The Case Against Critical Thinking

To speak against critical thinking in today’s academy is comparable to denying the divinity of Jesus in the medieval church—it’s heterodox. Not only does it rail against the values of contemporary scholarship, it may even be foolish in light of today’s students. Isn’t the lack of critical thinking the problem in modern society?

Here’s how one student textbook on critical thinking begins:

This book is about the power of disciplined thinking. It’s about learning to think for yourself and being your own person. It’s about the personal empowerment and enrichment that result from learning to use your mind to its fullest potential. In short, it’s about critical thinking.

Who doesn’t want empowerment and freedom? These are the mantras of modern individualism. Another author describes critical thinking as “self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking.” The aspect emphasized here is the self: by delving deeply into the self, one can critique their own thought patterns.

However, this overwhelming focus on critical thinking as the right approach for education isn’t as strong as its supporters believe. What is lacking in education today is anchoring the search for knowledge in a charitable outlook, one that emphasizes care and respect over suspicion and critique.

René Descartes can be seen as a champion of critical thinking. Descartes arrived at his conclusions through crisis, doubt, and skepticism. He was on a quest for truth—a task that resonates with colleges today. The question he sought to answer was, “How can humans know anything with certainty?” Even a statement such as, “I am writing at my desk” was riddled with doubt because he could be dreaming or imagining. Perhaps Descartes eternally existed in self-deception.

The idea that emerged from Descartes’ wrestle with doubt was doubt itself. The only reliable aspect of reality is doubt. Hence the famous deduction of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Autonomous reason determined certainty. The only authority over a student is his mind and the boundless self. What surfaces from Descartes doubt is a hermeneutic of suspicion: the student should doubt all things, have a critical disposition, and only appeal to reason for truth—in short, to critically think.

A hermeneutic of suspicion is the dominant paradigm of American higher education in the 21st century, which functions by a set of rules that question, critique, and subvert whatever information is presented. I would suppose that even during this essay the dominant question is not, “Where is this article revealing the true, good, or beautiful?” (evaluative) but instead “Where is this wrong and where do I disagree?” (critical).

These questions often guide today’s scholars. This theory of interpretation separates truth from the source material and from authority. Gerald Bruns connects this disposition to Descartes as he comments, “Call this Cartesian hermeneutics, or the allegory of suspicion, in which the text comes under the control of the reader as disengaged rational subject, unresponsive to its own self-certitude…The motive of Cartesian hermeneutics is to preserve alienation as a condition of freedom from the text.” Authority then lies within the reader himself. Knowledge is not a gift; it is man’s internal state. The author is no longer a person; rather, the text is a material, abstract subject. The reader is not bound by love of the person and concern for truth but by technical methods and abstraction of meaning (i.e. critical thinking).

Critical thinking sets up students with the wrong state of mind. Instead, I want to suggest charity is a better posture for learning because, as philosopher Esther Meek posits in Loving to Know, “love, not indifference, invites the real…Love presumes that the real is lovely or loveable or worth loving…What this is arguing is that love is what enables us to see things as they are and as they are meant to be.”

Whereas the modern educational endeavor is based on distrust, Parker Palmer argues that education is about care and relationship and trust in To Know As We Are Known. He explains truth’s etymology:

“The English word ‘truth’ comes from a Germanic root that also gives rise to our word ‘troth,’ as in the ancient vow ‘I pledge thee my troth.’ With this word one person enters a covenant with another, a pledge to engage in a mutually accountable and transforming relationship, a relationship forged of trust and faith in the face of unknowable risks.”

To know is a relational engagement. It is a communal task of care; as such, charity ought to be the foundation. Since knowledge and education are more than about rational knowing, Baylor professor Alan Jacobs argues that true belonging is about “a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted…For there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that is toward kindness and generosity.”

This argument compels the student to be around generous, charitable interpreters even at the expense of agreeing with one another. Education is a social process; therefore, it is a matter of being around the proper society; namely, one oriented toward charity. By charity, I mean a moral obligation to a neighbor. This idea rails against the modern notion of critical thinking as a self-imposed and pursued activity that distrusts others.

To critically think is to conclude that you have all the information you need, and you’ve done all the thinking necessary. It assumes that you are correct, and whatever you are hearing or reading is wrong, misguided, or misleading. Charitable thinking requires a humility that considers, “I could be wrong about this”—even if the “this” is personally repulsive. It’s in this way that we can be challenged in our thinking, where minority opinions are heard and respected, and free speech is protected. You may very well still disagree at the end of charitable thinking, but at least it requires patience to listen.

In a loving relationship with truth, the whole task of education and learning is wrapped in care. Care carries the knower and seeker. As Esther Meek argues, “To care is to move toward the unknown.” This is a beautiful picture of education. One should desire to know more because they care—about the subject, about the author, about the teacher, about his future relationships. Desire is the package that carries the knower to the unknown. Meek explains, “Longing calls for the other to give; love actively gives oneself for the sake of the other.” In other words, education is pulled by longing and directed by love.

https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2020/11/the-case-against-the-cult-of-critical-thinking/

Correct Diagnostics Needed for black "gap"

You present to a physician with severe abdominal pain. He examines you and concludes that your ingrown toenails are the cause of your abdominal distress. He prescribes that you soak your feet in warm water but that does not bring relief to your abdominal pain. Then he suggests that you apply antibiotics to your feet. Still no relief. Then the physician suggests that you wear sandals instead of shoes. Still no relief. The point of this story is that your toenails can be treated until the cows come home, but if there is improper diagnosis, then you are still going to have your abdominal pain.

The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, Meria Carstarphen, last year said, "White students are nearly 4.5 grade levels ahead of their black peers within Atlanta Public Schools." In San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students, it is 12% -- a gap of 58%. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading, as did only 23% of black students -- a gap of 60%. In Philadelphia, 47% of black students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, 59% of black students scored below basic in math and 49% in reading. In Detroit, 73% of black students scored below basic in math and 56% in reading.

"Below basic" is the score a student receives when he is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and grade level skills. How much can racism explain this? To do well in school, someone must make a kid do his homework, get a good night's rest, have breakfast and mind the teacher. If these basic family functions are not performed, it makes little difference how much money is put into education the result will be disappointing.

In 2019, the racial breakdown of high school seniors who took the ACT college entrance exam and met its readiness benchmarks was 62% of Asians, 47% of whites, 23% of Hispanics and 11% of blacks. That helps explain a 2016 study by Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce "African Americans: College Majors and Earnings." It found that black college students were highly concentrated in lower-paying and less academically demanding majors like administrative services and social work. They are much less likely than other students to major in science, technology, engineering and math, even though blacks in these fields earned as much as 50% more than blacks who earned a bachelor's degree in art or psychology and social work.

James D. Agresti, the president and co-founder of Just Facts has just published an article titled "Social Ills That Plague African Americans Coincide with Leftism, Not Racism." Agresti writes: "Among all of the afflictions that disproportionately impact people of color, violence may be the worst. In 2018, blacks comprised 13% of the U.S. population but roughly 53% of the 16,000 murder victims." The clearance rate for murders, where a suspect was identified and charged, declined from 92% in 1960 to 62% in 2018. For example, in Chicago, the clearance rate fell from 96% in 1964 to 45% in 2018. In Baltimore, the 2019 clearance rate was 32%. In 2015, when Baltimore experienced the highest per-capita murder rate in its history, the average homicide suspect had been previously arrested more than nine times. When crimes remain unsolved, it gives criminals free range and black people are their primary victims. By the way, most law enforcement occurs at the local level. The governments at these local levels are typically dominated by Democrats.

According to statistics about fatherless homes, 90% of homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes; 71% of pregnant teenagers lack a father figure; 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes; 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes; and 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions have no father. Furthermore, fatherless boys and girls are twice as likely to drop out of high school and twice as likely to end up in jail. Dr. Thomas Sowell has argued, "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

The bottom line is that while every vestige of racial discrimination has not been eliminated, today's discrimination cannot go very far in explaining the problems faced by a large segment of the black community.

https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/11/18/correct-diagnostics-needed-n2580177

Common Core and the Decline of History Education

At every Olympic Games, a 26.2-mile race celebrates Pheidippides’ grueling run back to Athens to bring news of the great Athenian victory over the Persian army at the Battle of Marathon. According to last year’s California-approved ancient-history textbook from McGraw-Hill, however, the Greeks “defeated the Persian navy.” The author of this text also wrote the 2006 edition of the same book, from the same publisher. That earlier edition correctly describes the battle as a clash of armies.

So what changed between 2006 and 2019?

Answer: the Common Core.

American ideas of republican, representative government; the dangers of dictatorship; and the tensions between a republic and an empire all come directly from the experience of republican Rome. Our ideas about democracy and a natural law for all human beings come from the ideas and politics of the Greek poleis. More than 2,000 years ago, Greece and Rome wrestled with what citizenship meant, what freedom meant, what justice meant—just as we wrestle with them today. But in order for us to benefit from what they wrote, we must teach it effectively.

In recent years, debates over math and reading instruction have been intensified by the adoption in virtually all states of the federally promoted Common Core standards in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA). The new standards move in exactly the wrong direction: they systematically neglect the content of history and literature in favor of reading skills. By narrowing the focus to a single state, California, and a single subject, Greco-Roman history, we can see that the Common Core has done harm.

The most compelling evidence is the decline in quality between two versions of a textbook written by Jackson Spielvogel before and after California adopted the Common Core. Both have been California-approved textbooks for the sixth grade. Spielvogel’s earlier book is much easier to read and has fewer errors.

The earlier edition was a California-specific subset of Spielvogel’s History of the World for middle schools (a different subset is used in Florida). That book is itself a simplified version of his widely used World History for high schools; it is used, for example, in Texas. This California edition follows a conventional narrative structure largely based on chronology, but with digressions on relevant subjects. The illustrations are appropriate and reasonably well-chosen. There is only one “reading skills” interruption per section. A study that I conducted with Williamson M. Evers and Victor Davis Hanson found some errors, but a clear narrative. Our main complaint was that the text was not engaging enough for younger readers.

Far from improving the teaching about the ancient world, however, the Common Core has made it more difficult—as shown in the textbook’s later edition, which dispenses with a single clear narrative in favor of a fashionable and confusing hypertext-like structure consisting of a sequence of disconnected units, each with a title and a few paragraphs of text. It appears as if a more continuous text had been broken up into “bites” by a subsequent editor who apparently believed that students cannot absorb a narrative, only short single-topic units. The new edition contains fewer illustrations but many more “reading skills” questions—often one per page.

What is the result of the Common Core changes? The newer text is harder to follow, less interesting, and less well written. More surprisingly, it also has many more errors. We found the same 16 errors in both editions, but an additional 20 errors in the 2019 edition. How do we explain this deterioration? In line with the Common Core focus on “reading skills,” as implemented in 2016 by California’s 855-page “Framework” for history/social-science instruction, textbook publishers now include “reading specialists” in the editorial process. These editors apparently do not know a book’s subject, so their work introduces errors while also seeming to drain life from the text. These changes can be directly attributed to the Common Core.

Reading classes should emphasize reading skills; history classes should focus on content—namely, history. We should make the history and literature of the classical world more memorable—more stories, less hypertext—and we should tie them directly to the American republican experiment. Before 1776, before 1619, before 1492, before AD, there was 490 BC and the Battle of Marathon, which freed Athens to found our civilization. To adapt Milton’s advice, we should “justify the ways of America to her children.” We can’t do that with the Common Core standards, which take exactly the wrong approach to reforming history education.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13323

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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