Critical Thinking (or Theory?) and Classical Learning

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Institutions of classical learning face something of a crossroads when they decide whether or not to use the language of “critical thinking” to describe the value of their programs.

That alone is a statement worthy of reflection. Most educational programs wouldn’t think twice. Of course, we teach critical thinking, they say. In fact, if a school or university does not include “critical thinking” loud and proud in their institutional learning outcomes then they’ll be perceived as naive by their peers.

Even accrediting agencies require their universities to produce critical thinkers.

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education tells its institutions to give students the "skills and knowledge necessary for critical analysis, logical thinking, and independent judgment." The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges requires its institutions’ General Education programs to “include coursework to develop skills in critical thinking.” And in order to meet the standards of WASC (sorry, done spelling out the full names), universities must show how their “students consistently use critical thinking and other intellectual skills across all levels of the curriculum.”

But what do we even mean by “critical thinking?”

I feel like Donny from The Big Lebowski: “You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie and wants to know….”

I’ll tell you what we mean by it, but it won’t be satisfying. We mean more than just thinking. We mean thinking critically. Critical thinking is one of those terms that everybody uses because everybody uses it. You can’t just say “thinking” otherwise you’re out of touch. Critical thinking accomplishes something more. But what would be the product of critical thinking? Criticism? Few that use the term would commit to that. It sounds far too specific, since criticism is generally associated with evaluation or judgment.

Some years ago, Rita Felski rocked the world of academic criticism in a book called The Limits of Critique in which she called out the unthinking ubiquity of this obsession with critique. Especially in the humanities and social sciences, the only acceptable (meaning, publishable) scholarship was the “critical” kind. She called it a false choice between the critical and uncritical:

“What if we refused to be railroaded into the false choice between the critical and the uncritical? How might argument and interpretation proceed if critique were no longer our ubiquitous watchword and ever-vigilant watchdog? What other shapes of thought could we imagine? And how else might we venture to read, if we were not ordained to read suspiciously?”

For an all too brief moment, the academy began to imagine other sorts of scholarship — constructive thought, or scholarship that offered an interpretation of history for the good of knowing it, or scholarship that was fueled by admiration rather than cynicism. But in my opinion the most significant observation Felski made was that the academy was astoundingly unreflective about its obsession with critique.

It’s funny, I remember a grad school professor of mine stopping a student in his tracks when the student used the verb, “critiquing.” “Critique isn’t a verb!,” he cried out. “We have a verb for that, it’s to criticize.” As it happens, the professor was wrong. But the grad student’s response was why the episode has stuck with me. He said, “But I don’t mean to criticize. I mean critique. It comes from the French response to the Frankfurt school and from Foucault and Lacan. It’s based in their notions of ‘intersubjectivity.’” I’m not one to dismiss a statement just because of its name-dropping, but that was really just another way of saying, “I don’t know, it sounds smarter.”

“Critical Thinking” is performative.

By that, I mean that it provides a certain clout for the person or institution using it and also that it situates the statement culturally. Saying “we teach critical thinking” is like acknowledging the indigenous tribes who used to live on the land where our school is built. We’re not going to do anything about it, except to point it out, but the speech act of pointing it out performs a sort of cultural sympathy that has become accepted as the thing that must be done about it.

When we say that our schools teach “critical thinking,” what we’re really saying is that our schools will help teach students how to sound educated. We might not do anything about it (since we don’t know what we mean by it), and it may just have become the case that using the phrase counts as doing it.

Maybe you think that’s a cynical interpretation or that I’m making too much of it. But try this experiment: ask your school or your child’s school what makes their education in “critical” thinking different from an education in plain old thinking. And ask for examples. My guess is that their first example would be to point to their curriculum in writing and composition, that their students perform research and present this research in defense of a thesis-driven argument. In other words, they teach…

logic, grammar, and rhetoric, the foundation of the medieval liberal arts.

Is critical thinking then just a version of critical theory?

Absolutely not. I’ve read some critical theorists who claim that it is. And I’ve read some people sure who hate critical theory claim that it is. But only by tracing the two terms through a maze of popular and academic cultural movements can we make the connection.

It might go something like this. Critical Theory came from the application of marxist economics to anthropology, and then from anthropology to aesthetics and the study of culture. Meanwhile, critical thinking tends to be associated with thinking across disciplines. For instance, “religion” should be studied theologically, historically, sociologically, aesthetically, economically, and politically at the same time. And this cross-disciplinary orientation — and even the terminology of “disciplines” instead of “fields of knowledge” — has its modern origins in Critical Theory. …But that path is so meandering that it probably isn’t very informative.

One connection that does strike me as potentially notable, however, is that we tend to tack on the word “skill” to the end of the term. Thus, “critical thinking skills.” We have the Pragmatist philosophy of learning, developed especially by John Dewey, to thank for the focus on skills-based learning. Dewey advocated for a reorientation of learning around practical skills in order to combat the imbalances created by capitalism. And there’s certainly a connection between Dewey’s notions of social reform and his philosophy of education.

But consider how forced this sounds: “Critical Thinking Skills.” Even more so when you take out the first term and are left with, “Thinking Skills.” What is a thinking skill? Is it different from thinking well?

Institutions of classical learning should stop using “critical thinking” on their websites and in their syllabi.

…not because it’s a closet marxist thing to say, but because we have a better way of saying what we really mean.

We have the Trivium (the tools of learning) in Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. And we have the Quadrivium (the order of knowing) in Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. I’m far from being a classical education purist, and I frequently point out that traditional liberal arts education has been detached from the practical and applied dimensions that were so formative in its development in the ancient and medieval periods. But we shouldn’t feel like we need to justify the educational payoff of the kind of thinking we teach by saying that it’s “critical.”

In fact, we do an injustice to what the ancients would simply refer to as “understanding” and “wisdom.” As always, I refer to Aristotle who, along with Plato, thought about thinking so much and so well. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle unapologetically extols “theoretical” knowledge as a higher form of thought, the kind of thought that gives us wisdom:

all men suppose what is called Wisdom to deal with the first causes and the principles of things; so that, as has been said before, the man of experience is thought to be wiser than the possessors of any sense-perception whatever, the artist wiser than the men of experience, the masterworker than the mechanic, and the theoretical kinds of knowledge to be more of the nature of Wisdom than the productive. Clearly then Wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes.

So many of Aristotle’s works begin the same well. Whether he’s talking about grammar, politics, physics, ethics, or metaphysics, he begins by observing that the our main inquiry is into the causes or “principles” of the thing that we’re studying. If it’s politics, for example, and the thing we’re studying is the city or polis, then we should be asking why it is that cities exist. From the answer to that question, we can then consider what it is that makes a city excellent, what a virtuous city is. And then only from there will we begin comparing different kinds of constitutions and ways of organizing and governing cities.

Let’s seek understanding.

Not critical understanding. Just understanding, for the sake of wisdom — which is the application of understanding to our pursuit of the good life.

To understand something means to know its causes. I think a lot of university provosts and accreditation agency officers might see a statement like, “we teach students to understand,” and conclude that it’s too weak of a statement to make. Isn’t understanding low on the scale of learning, toward the bottom near rote memorization?

But it’s our fault that understanding has become impoverished in its common usage. For to understand something means to define it, to identify its principles, the properties that make it intelligible in the first place. In this way, we conspicuously misunderstand “critical thinking” because we can’t really differentiate it from anything else.

I’ve noticed that when you see the phrase, “critical thinking skills” in a schools print or online material and read on, you often encounter a list of what seem to be intellectual virtues — qualities like open-mindedness, the ability to evaluate arguments based on given evidence, and empathy. Sometimes even an ethical disposition appears in these lists. These are worthy intellectual virtues, but they’re also just worse versions of the intellectual virtues that we already have. Historically, understanding itself is an intellectual virtue, along with prudence, wisdom, art/craftsmanship, and science. These are called intellectual virtues because they exercise the excellence of the intellect. They help lead us to the truth — and not just the idea of truth but the truth of living and making. They fortify and substantiate our thought.

One important difference between intellectual virtues like understanding and critical thinking is that the latter lacks the order of learning that organizes the former. For example, open-mindedness is good, but open-mindedness alone doesn’t mean much. It has a place within the order of inquiry. The same goes for the ability to construct arguments. Rhetoric is good, but it’s only good if is used to persuade somebody about something that is true. Understanding comes first.

In other words, understanding, along with the other intellectual virtues, allow us to think well. Critical thinking is just begging to return to what we really mean, understanding.

I’m excited to host visiting professor, Christof Meyer, at Hildegard College this week.

Christof is a strategy consultant, church founder, entrepreneur, and business owner. I like this photo of him in his additional role as an officer in the U.S. military.

Christof comes this week to talk with our students in their Entrepreneurship classes about Organizational Development. Org Development deals with an organization’s identity, business plan, go-to-market strategy, and growth strategy. It answers the question of how you’re organization, business, or product is going to get from A to B.

One of the hallmarks of Hildegard College is that the majority of our faculty have multiple vocations. They are liberal artists, but they also live out the convictions of their classical learning in civic service, church leadership, business, and family life.

Speaking of which, if you’re in southern California or plan to visit, you’re welcome to come sit in on a class at Hildegard College. To set this up, either message me or write to us at admissions@hildegard.college.