In Part I of this post I talked about rationality in general, and why it’s generally considered a good thing: not the be-all-and-end-all of life, or even of learning, but an essential part of the mix. This was by way of a lead-in to the question of how we can teach people (young and not-so-young) to be better critical thinkers. Which, unless you’re a latter-day member of a certain once-dignified political party, you will probably agree is a good thing.
It’s widely supposed that the liberal arts promote critical thinking/rationality; and I wrote Inside the Liberal Arts to explore that proposition on several levels: to put muscle on the bone, so to speak. Doing this involves a series of claims: that rationality is a good that we need to promote, for ourselves, our communities, and society in general; that education, and particularly liberal education, is a key means of promoting it (is there any other? Not TikTok or Twitter, I’m afraid). I further suggest, at the outset, that rationality, in the intellectual form that dates to Ancient Greece, is in fact the very soul of the liberal arts, and the common denominator that unifies all of the different disciplines.
The stage is now set (if not, read the book!) for the big question: how do we teach kids to be more rational? I take it for granted that this is a question for K-12 education as well as for colleges and universities, and arguably more important on the K-12 level, because not everyone goes to college, or wants or needs to go to college, but everyone becomes a citizen. And if you aren’t already at least a junior critical thinker when you enter college, you’re unlikely to get much further.
We teach a little of it whenever we expose a logical contradiction, or an informal logical fallacy; whenever we explore and analyze a text, whether fiction or nonfiction, or a work of art; whenever we think critically about a public policy, or a public figure. We teach it, in some form, whenever we speak or argue coherently, because language itself is innately philosophical, rational, and logical. So yes, a lot of rationality tools get communicated through teaching and learning of all kinds. My grandchildren get some of those tools by watching “Dora the Explorer,” and a lot more just by talking with their parents and others. The question remains: are there specific ways to teach particular (or general) rational skills?
I have no specific blueprint and welcome your suggestions. Drafting such a blueprint is above my pay grade and should be accomplished by a blue-ribbon consortium of teachers, philosophers, and education scholars. But I do have a vague idea – one that doesn’t isolate the skills from the content of the crucial liberal learning that takes place in the K-12 grades.
That idea involves a distinct curriculum – perhaps a course for each grade – that is a hybrid of traditional “content learning” and thinking skills: a curriculum that would be calibrated to different grade levels, and that draws on philosophy, history, geography, sociology, literature, economics, psychology, art – in short, any and all of the liberal arts – while highlighting, and reinforcing, particular thinking skills at particular stages and in particular contexts.
A somewhat arcane example of what I have in mind – because it’s on a very high level of philosophical reasoning – might at least suggest what I’m getting at. In his monumental work The Order of Things (1970), Michel Foucault devotes the entire first chapter to the discussion of a single painting: “Las Meninas,” a masterpiece painted ca. 1656 by Diego Velázquez.
Foucault analyzes the painting to death, one might say. It’s a complex treatment of a complex subject. But in the process, we learn a lot about both art and, by example, analytic thinking. The same could be done in more accessible ways, drawing from innumerable other sources.
Similarly (again, I can’t avoid choosing philosophical examples) there are a number of great philosophers who, at least in isolated passages, are remarkably accessible and illuminating. No Continental thinkers need apply here – forget the French or the Germans. But Plato (e.g., the parable of the cave), Aristotle, Descartes, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, even Ludwig Wittgenstein (he was Austrian not German) offer insights into thinking that highschoolers would benefit from.
Another example I’ve come across is from the unlikely (in this context) field of engineering. A book titled 101 Things I Learned in Engineering School, by John Kuprenas and Matthew Frederick, is full of brief and rewarding insights into both how the world works and how we think about it.
I’m thinking aloud here, drawing on whatever examples come to mind. But is there anything more important than acculturating K-12 students to critical thinking? Is there any knowledge “of the world” that doesn’t involve, and require, our being able to think critically, to see the larger context, the bigger picture, the pattern in the drapes?
Unless you’re the sort of philistine (to use the kindest word) who thinks education is a process for grooming people to become assembly-line workers or hedge-fund managers, rather than citizens who may happen to work in an assembly line or at a hedge fund, the question answers itself. We need to teach thinking, and teach about the world, because they are inseparable. The only question is, how much of that teaching of thinking is made explicit, abstracted from the content. Or maybe you have a better idea.