Critical thinking has become the latest educational buzzword, but it needs to be implemented across the board
DESPITE the overwhelming consensus about the importance of critical thinking in educational programmes and curricula, learning in most cases still remains a passive, non-engaging process and experience.
Thinking critically is inextricably related to independent and thoughtful judgements with regards to our everyday problems and experiences. In other words, critical thinking means being able to think for ourselves without relying on others to make those judgments, evaluations, and decisions for us.
Despite the overall increase in literacy and the national rise in tertiary education enrolment, our ability to think critically still remains questionable. In fact, our everyday social, educational, and political attitudes illustrate emphatically our lack of critical thinking. Thriving nepotism in our political and working careers, naïve politicisation based on our family relations, and our overindulgence of our children (adolescents that we treat as if they are babies) are just a few examples of attitudes that are devoid of critical thinking.
My aim here is certainly not to offend. I would like, however, to underline the importance of critical thinking in our everyday lives and provide a few suggestions of how to cultivate and foster it.
The term ‘critical thinking’ has become the latest educational buzzword. Educators, parents and politicians, to name a few, espouse the necessity of an education that promotes critical thinking. Unfortunately, most of these comments are in themselves quite uncritical and limited in scope simply because they assign the role of cultivating our children’s critical skills exclusively to schools. Naturally schools have a paramount role in this issue, but contributions from other directions are also important. In other words, our attitudes as parents, friends and leaders are also crucial to promoting critical thinking. It is paradoxical if not immature for a parent to bemoan the lack of critical thinking in his children while indoctrinating them from a young age into his political affiliations. Similarly, it is ridiculous for a leader to cry out for educational reforms that will promote critical thinking while leading a political party that recruits and indoctrinates children from a young age. Both attitudes are co
mmon in our society and in fact reveal a lack of critical thinking from those who lament its absence in our children.
Thinking critically means making choices in life that are based on personal, social and moral considerations and assuming responsibility for them; it means holding oneself and one’s leaders to responsible actions; it means not following trendy and popular attitudes or beliefs uncritically, and it means being independent and free as a person.
Obviously, thinking critically can have unexpected and even unpleasant results for some of us. Are we prepared as parents to cut the umbilical cord at an earlier age than we are used to? Are we prepared as leaders to ask the people to vote for us based on our exceptional and responsible political actions and attitudes instead of on our promises for easing their way in the social hierarchy? Are we prepared as teachers to be questioned and contested by our students? If we are, then we are paving the road for a much freer, responsible and overall healthy society.
I am not an expert on how to promote and foster critical thinking in children, but I am quite certain that most students are repeatedly told what to learn but hardly ever taught how to learn. It is vital to teach our students various processes of learning. For instance, for subjects like biology that require some form of memorisation, instead of expecting them to simply memorise the innumerable terms that to most of them are simply alien we can perhaps make them think about their etymology or ask them to make links with existing knowledge, teaching them thereby another process of learning, that of scaffolding, instead of meaningless sheer memorisation.
In class, in all subjects there are ample opportunities to sharpen our students’ thinking skills. It is intriguing to notice how most students prefer lessons where they simply have to copy from the board and are expected to reproduce this knowledge later on. Because of this passive process of learning most of our students are reluctant to think for themselves and when asked to do so they are utterly confused.
We need to replace this process of learning with a more engaging one, where students are constantly asked to think even about the most seemingly obvious issues. For example, in history instead of reiterating dates and events and asking them to learn them by heart, we can perhaps ask them about time itself and lead them towards a clearer understanding of time, that is, that time is historical and not natural. Furthermore, we should ask them about the authors’ choices of language, sources, chapter titles etc., since all these are choices that are fraught with significance. In this way, they learn not to take things for granted and to interrogate existing beliefs that may be deeply ingrained not because of fundamental knowledge but because of hearsay.
In addition, instead of studying events in isolation, we can provide parallel examples where human attitudes were similar to those of the event(s) that we are focusing on. For instance, when studying the Greek Civil War we can ask our students to compare it in terms of its causes and overall aspects to other civil wars like the Russian Civil War; or when studying the British colonial period in Cyprus instead of simply looking into the aspects of colonisation in Cyprus we can research together with our students and then draw comparisons between the Cypriot colonial experience and African, Indian, or Caribbean paradigms. These approaches embellish our students’ knowledge while at the same time inviting them to think analytically and critically about human attitudes and historical events.
Another very important approach to critical thinking is participation in well-structured dialogues and debates. Our students quite often bewail the lack of communication between themselves and their teachers, and express their desire to have their ideas heard. Well-structured and meaningful discussions are terrific for enhancing not only communication between teachers and students, but most importantly for teaching students how to think quickly and meaningfully while providing them also with opportunities to express these thoughts.
For example, in biology after providing some essential information on the theory of evolution, we could instigate a debate on Creationism vs. Darwinism; in social education we can initiate a dialogue on animal rights; in literature we can discuss books, poems, or stories that have made a great impression on us and explore the reasons for these impressions. In these occasions students are challenged and intrigued to ask each other questions or clarifications, thus engaging more deeply in thinking.
Learning information passively may help some students to excel in tests and exams (that are often themselves devoid of critical questions), but does not enable them to think critically and independently later on in life. It is imperative that we start engaging our students in situations where their existing knowledge is challenged and where they have to think for themselves, promoting thus more independent, impartial, and liberated attitudes in our society.
Marios Vassiliou is a teacher at Highgate School in Nicosia
