‘Critical Thinking’: An Educational Shock CollarRather than teaching students to interrogate all premises, “critical thinking” demands they adopt a position of unwavering faith in liberal conventions.
Adam Ellwanger
Mar 1, 2023
The rigor and excellence of the American education system is in steady decline. At every level—primary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities—academic performance has been deprioritized in favor of ideological indoctrination. Properly understood, 2020 was the culmination of a covert revolution that was decades in the making. Now, the institutional left is so firmly entrenched in American schools that they believe they cannot be dislodged or expelled. For those who paid minimal attention to our schools before 2020, this hostile takeover seemed to come out of nowhere. But it didn’t. The signs of the revolution have been evident for decades—if you knew how to interpret them.
And yet, even after Americans have been awakened to the conquest of the schools, there is one sign that remains unacknowledged by the general public. This is the educational emphasis on “critical thinking,” which casual observers still view as harmless, if not an absolute good. Understanding the ideological baggage that this term carries will be essential if we are to mount any meaningful attempt to reclaim American education.
“Critical thinking” is so incessantly cited as a goal for schooling writ large that almost no one thinks to ask exactly what it means. Again and again and again, “thinking critically” is held up as the learning outcome at which all instruction aims. The student who can think critically, we are assured, is the educated student. Almost no reasonable person would say that critical thinking is a bad learning outcome for students, which is why the term escapes our attention. After all, what could possibly be wrong with thinking about things critically?
When most people hear the term critical thinking, they assume it means good thinking, or rigorous thinking. But if this is all that is meant by the term, it wouldn’t be so frequently invoked by educators—in class, in mission statements, in course materials, and in curricular design. It wouldn’t need to be invoked because everyone already agrees that good, rigorous habits of thought are…well, good.
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In truth, when educators talk about “critical” thinking, they are implicitly referring to a particular mental attitude—one defined by a radical hostility and skepticism towards ideas and values that are viewed as “common sense” or “inherited wisdom.” This view of critical thinking owes its heritage to two opposing intellectual traditions. The first is the tradition of Enlightenment empiricism and reason, which holds that the strongest forms of inquiry are those that begin from a position of disbelief and the assumption that nothing can be held as true until it can be logically proven as such.
The second tradition is that of so-called “critical theory”—a left-intellectual form of philosophical skepticism that took hold in Europe after World War II, and then immigrated to America. Critical theory often attacks the very pursuit of truth that Enlightenment rationality celebrated; its adherents insist that truth itself is a “socially constructed” concept that is utilized to justify unjust forms of cultural and political power. The task for critical theorists, then, is to expose the myth of truth in an effort to weaken public confidence in institutional power—a process they hope might ultimately topple the existing order, so that a new society can be built that affirms a dogmatic view of “social justice.”
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Of course, the sphere where this skepticism should be applied is very narrowly defined, and students are tasked with learning its scope. They should be extremely skeptical about Russia’s actions, which constitute an assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty, for example, but they should never ask whether illegal immigration from Central America represents a violation of U.S. sovereignty. Students should be skeptical about whether race is a legitimate concept, but they shouldn’t be skeptical about whether race-based entitlements should be written into public policy. In other words, the truth of traditional values and ideas is subjected to withering doubt and open disdain, while left-liberal ones are assumed to be objectively true and are placed neatly beyond the scope of any serious intellectual consideration.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/critical-thinking-an-educational-shock-collar/
