How 'Critical Thinking' builds castles in the air

The problem with 'Critical Thinking' is not just with the anti-realist theorists who developed it, or the amoral (at best) theories they developed it with (see previous posts), or that it's somehow 'Good in theory but not in practice', the problem is that it's bad in theory and so is even worse when put into practice.

The stated telos of 'Critical Thinking':
“...a student attains 'higher order thinking'
when he no longer believes in right or wrong..."

Part of the reason why the misosophical poison of 'Critical Thinking' (CT) is so successfully peddled as the cure for the sickness it spreads, is because its name & claims sound so sensible that people cannot imagine associating it with anything as disturbing as C.S. Lewis's warning about the progressive danger of thinking that "...no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other...", and so assume that teaching CT just means improving their kids thinking. Which is at least partly why everyone looks at me so cockeyed when I tell them that CT is not something they should adopt, or promote, or want to be taught to their kids:

"But Van, how can you possibly be against 'Critical Thinking'?!"

What is obvious from such questions, is that people simply accept the marketing of what 'everyone knows!' from promoters of 'Critical Thinking', without giving any actual thought to what it is that the system of thought that's promoted as 'Critical Thinking', actually is, means, and does, because, as we've already begun to see over the last several posts, giving CT even the minimum of consideration, quickly reveals that:

CT's claims about what it 'is', is an obvious case of stolen valor

CT's 'skills' are intended to induce amoral judgement (at best) as an ideal

CT leads to 'knowledge' which comprises very little understanding

, which is bad enough, however as you'll soon see, going past those initial questions that Socrates might've asked (see previous post), reveals what we'll see in this and the next two posts (coming this week), that:

CT's 'Thinking Skills' aren't real or relevant

CT deludes its practitioners into believing they know what they do not

CT's system of seeking after easy 'logical' answers, fosters, ensures, & preserves the fundamental ignorance of its students

The reasons for points of #4-#6, begin to become apparent in what a senior writer for Newsweek, Alexander Nazaryan, wrote about a decade ago when he was startled to hear from a spokesman for a New York State college, and from then President Obama, that

"critical thinking is a "21st-century skill" American students lack"

, and that students needed to be taught CT in order to 'think like a journalist'. His initial reaction to that was that they:

"...might be aghast to learn that I somehow managed to snag a desk in a newsroom without ever flashing my critical-thinking abilities, latent or otherwise, though I suspect knowing how to write a complex-compound sentence helped matters..."

, and he wrote "You're 100 Percent Wrong About Critical Thinking" to explain that despite its marketing, what students were getting through such programs, was not what his or other jobs actually required, yet every step of CT leads them to confidently feel 'as if' they had:

"...In pure lexical terms, "critical thinking" is "the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment." Translated into pedagogy, it's teaching students to be intellectual mavericks, cognitive cowboys who poke bullet holes into every received concept, who duel with Aristotle and Dickinson, who are never complacent, submissive or even quiet. They brim with what Walt Whitman called "original energy."

Our students, according to pretty much everyone, are crappy critical thinkers...."

The thin veneer of 'answers' which that "original energy" generates in students, effectively closes them off to a wealth of knowledge about what is real and true that they're unlikely to further scratch the surface of, and implicitly drills into them Bloom's Taxonomy's view that knowledge is only a technique of recall, a memory trick that "... represents the lowest level of learning outcomes in the cognitive domain", and so they feel assured that the *answers* that their 'critical thinking' skills scored them on their quizzes and tests were all they needed to know about those subjects they'd already studied.

Dennis Hayes, in a rare post for a professor of Education, wrote in "Stop trying to teach 'Critical Thinking'" ten years ago, that a responsible teacher understood that for their students to benefit from engaging in sound criticism of a subject, it required something more than:

"... moaning endlessly about education policies you dislike or telling students what they should think. It means first and foremost that you are capable of engaging in deep conversation. This means debate and discussion based on considerable knowledge – something that is almost entirely absent in the educational world. It also has to take place in public, with parents and others who are not teachers, not just in the classroom or staffroom...."[emphasis mine]

, but it's that need to develop a depth of knowledge on a subject first, that is precisely what 'Critical Thinking' both ignores and effectively conceals from its practitioners behind the appearances that its praxis of 'criticizing' generates, which leaves them unable to see that they amount to no more than sophistic 'gotcha-skills'.

And to the common CT claim of:

"But we have to teach critical thinking in order to train the next generation of experts”

, a professor of philosophy, Michael Huemer, noted that:

"...a) Only a tiny fraction of students will or should try to become experts. It doesn’t make sense to gear teaching toward a tiny fraction, rather than the vast majority of students...."

, and that:

"...People probably mostly use their “critical thinking” lessons to come up with ways of discounting counter-arguments that they don’t like and thereby sticking to the opinions they prefer..."

What's easy for everyone to see, is that practicing 'Critical Thinking' leads students to provide what appears to be an acceptable 'answer' to whichever task its instructors intend for them to resolve, without adequately thinking the issue through.

What goes unseen, is that because both the structure of its lessons and what the time spent on those lessons, has enabled our schools to omit by no longer teaching (from Homer to the Bible, and more), supporters of CT don't need to deny its failings, they simply absorb and redirect them into other 'difficulties' to be railed against. Such students who're educated by omission, are led into an ignorance of the value of having a depth of understanding of those subjects they are practicing 'critical thinking' upon, or even what that might look like.

So as 'Critical Thinkers' quizzes and tests lead them to feel confident that the 'answers' they get from having read a chapter from their textbook, a worksheet of 'tips', or Google/ChatGPT 'research' regarding it, is sufficient for what they need to practice their 'critical thinking' upon, they feel that same confidence in their 'research' on any other such subjects presented to them.

The notion that pursuing an education would (and should) lead to the breadth & depth of knowledge as what was once known for a 'Man of letters', or even the relatively shallow depth of general knowledge of an 1890s grade school student, is not just a foreign concept to the theorists of 'Critical Thinking' - it is counter to their aim of providing students with those 'useful skills' for shaping society by 'boosting the economy!', 'beating the Chinese!', etc. Teachers and students of 'Critical Thinking' are blinded by the practice of it, to the purpose of leading students out of the shadows of ignorance, which an actual Liberal Education once was and should still be intended to accomplish. Instead, their schooling unwittingly swaths them within the shadows cast by their easy answers, and grades & diploma in hand, they go out into the world blissfully un-aware of the vastness of what they do not know that they do not know.

How is that possible? Well... since you asked... have you heard the (in)famous maxim attributed to John Dewey (possibly paraphrased from "How We Think" (1910)), that

"We should teach How to think, not what to think!"

, it seems 'as if' that's such an obviously virtuous and 'objective' maxim, doesn't it? Have you ever considered the possibility that it is a fatal mistake to accept it as such? The reason why, is that in the best misdirection of the skilled philosophical stage magician (wizard), Dewey's maxim presents you with a false dilemma of having to choose between the 'How' of thinking well, and the deplorable notion of indoctrinating kids with 'What' to think, and with the audience distracted by that false dilemma, their attention is no longer on the traditional priority given to the knowledge of What is being considered (a coherent and integrated knowledge of facts, person, place, timeline, etc.), which sound thinking and truly valuable criticism requires, and cannot be had without.

In the place of that knowledge (which 'critical thinkers' consider to be the 'lowest level of the cognitive domain'), Dewey's maxim permits and encourages the student to conduct the most shallow acts of 'research' ('...find relevant facts in these worksheets...'), and to accept that as a sufficient basis for their analysis and synthesis of the subject at hand, because teaching 'How to think', is the template which their every lesson aims at teaching:

scan through text, match 'facts', retrieve 'answers!'

, and that is what our students are learning to do, without ever having been provided the substantive 'What' to think with (and that is what Dewey was after all along, which we'll dig further into in latter posts in this series). Such slight of mind trickery as this, which CT accomplishes out of sight, out of mind, is enough on its own to make me bristle when people talk of the need for more 'Critical Thinking!'.

To his credit, Hayes' article emphasizes that having the ability to offer criticism that's valuable, requires a depth of knowledge, first:

"...The need for teachers to engage in this kind of deep conversation has been forgotten, because they think that being critical is a skill. But the Australian philosopher John Passmore criticized this idea nearly half a century ago:

If being critical consisted simply in the application of a skill then it could in principle be taught by teachers who never engaged in it except as a game or defensive device, somewhat as a crack rifle shot who happened to be a pacifist might nevertheless be able to teach rifle-shooting to soldiers. But in fact being critical can be taught only by men who can themselves freely partake in critical discussion.

, but at the same time, and as a consequence of that, the step-by-step 'critical thinking skills' approach brushes off the need to consider or integrate what little knowledge that students do have, into the whole of what they know to be *true*, and they do so because CT implicitly relies upon the pragmatic view of 'true' as being only 'what works' at the moment (becoming useful), which may change in the next moment as something else becomes more usefully *true* (more on this horror in the latter posts).

The designers of public education knew about these issues long before 'Critical Thinking' was devised as a more efficient means of furthering their ideas, and they haven't been secretive about the fact that they do not think of education as being important for an individual, but as being useful for shaping society into becoming what they think it 'should' become. As I've pointed out often over the last two decades, our pro-regressive 'Progressive Educators' have openly declared that they want a very select few (selected by them) to have what they thought of as being 'Educated', and they thought that it would be best "for the common good" that the rest of the population should be given only that schooling that was needed for them to easily mistake what we call 'Critical Thinking', as an equivalent to being 'educated', as from this post:

Woodrow Wilson, when still president of Princeton University in 1909, advised the Federation of High School Teachers as being an critical purpose to their teaching:

"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."

, a view which was also echoed by James E. Russell, head of Columbia University Teachers College, who gave a speech there in 1905 called "The Trend in American Education", where he expressed his equally 'pragmatic' concern that:

"...How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which in the nature of events cannot possibly be fulfilled ? If the chief object of government be to promote civil order and social stability , how can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders?..."

Continuing on from the article by Dennis Hayes, he makes three critical points about 'Critical Thinking':

1. “Critical thinking” is a skill. No it is not. At best this view reduces criticism to second-rate or elementary instruction in informal and some formal logic. It is usually second-rate logic and poor philosophy offered in bite-sized nuggets. Seen as a skill, critical thinking can also mean subjection to the conformism of an ideological yoke. If a feminist or Marxist teacher demands a certain perspective be adopted this may seem like it is “criticism” or acquiring a “critical perspective”, but it is actually a training in feminism or Marxism which could be done through tick box techniques. It almost acquires the character of a mental drill.
2. “Critical thinking” means indoctrination. When teachers talk about the need to be “critical” they often mean instead that students must “conform”. It is often actually teaching students to be “critical” of their unacceptable ideas and adopt the right ones. Having to support multiculturalism and diversity are the most common of the “correct ideas” that everyone has to adopt. Professional programs in education, nursing, social work and others often promote this sort of “criticism”. It used to be called “indoctrination”.
3. “Critical theories” are “uncritical theories”. When some theory has the prefix “critical” it requires the uncritical acceptance of a certain political perspective. Critical theory, critical race theory, critical race philosophy, critical realism, critical reflective practice all explicitly have political aims.

[emphasis mine]

Reducing an education to a set of skills that students are to accept being drilled in, so as to get the grades they need in order to get a 'good job', leaves those students critically deprived of the fruits of an actual Education rooted in an integrated understanding of what is, what follows, and how you should behave towards that, and without which, no matter how many 'facts' can be recalled, the student is unable to understand any lessons from history.

It's no coincidence that such 'Critical Thinker's are churned out with diplomas by our schools, to become conduits for the circulation of the propaganda that they've not only been trained to accept as 'answers' that 'everyone knows!', but to 'understand' that how to arrive at those same 'answers', from any starting point ('White Privilege!' ,'Systemic Racism!', '...Socialism!' ,'...Capitalism!'), is what they're being trained to do without thinking about what they're thinking, and so they're unaware of how prone they themselves are to becoming the latest products of the most alarming lessons of history (see Fichte's plan for education).

In The Critical Thinking Skills Hoax, classical school educator Martin Cothran points out that:

"...It is an interesting fact that the people who say that they want to improve our schools spend so much time talking about “critical thinking skills” and so little about logic. One of the reasons is undoubtedly that the word “logic” is much more concrete. It implies learning and being able to use a specific system of rational rules that can be taught- what the ancients called an “art.” Logic has an actual history of having been taught, and taught in a certain way. It is not nearly so amorphous as the term “critical thinking skills.”

But for propaganda purposes, it is less useful to use exact words. Vague words with indeterminate meanings are much to be preferred. “Thinking skills, thinking skills, rah-rah-rah!” In fact, “thinking skills” is only one of the terms in a constellation of vague promotional phrases used by education reformers. Others include “problem-solving skills,” “inferencing skills,” main idea finding,” and “higher-order skills.” Again, these sound good, but what exactly do they mean?

And these share with “critical thinking skills” the same problems. Not only are they ill-defined, but in a sense they really don’t exist, at least not as separate areas of study.

Knowledge is unnecessary, goes the thinking of progressive educators, because the only thing necessary is skills. And so we think we can divorce skills from knowledge. ..." [emphasis mine]

This isn't difficult to see for yourself in your own school systems (public and private), and it too follows from Dewey's emphasis on teaching 'How to think, not what to think!', and it is the driving factor behind our cultural drift (plunge) away from our understanding of the West in general, and of America in particular, and those who're providing it know that that's the real value (to them), in their schooling of students in 'Critical Thinking'. And of course any mention of this comes as a complete surprise (or so we hope) to 'The Right', who are always so downright eager to insist on ever more lessons in 'Critical Thinking', and ever more standardized tests to prove what 'answers' they 'know', and that still more is required for them to become useful for 'boosting the economy' and defeating [Japan, Germany, Russia, China, A.I., etc...].

That same misleading emphasis on performing a 'How' while neglecting the 'What', is apparent in the descriptive text in this 'Bloom's Taxonomy Of Learning' pyramid. Starting with what it puts at the pinnacle of the pyramid with 'Create':

"The peak of the domain is creating, where students synthesize various elements to form a coherent, original whole."

, and then in looking at its base with 'Remember':

"Define, duplicate, list, memorize, repeat, state"

, resist the urge to assume that they mean what you think they mean, and clarify by asking about the "What"?

Remember what? Define what? Memorize, repeat, state... what? Committing lists of words & phrases that 'everyone knows!' to memory, and understanding what those words refer to and why it's important to remember them, are two very different things, and they are used to accomplish exceedingly different objectives, and if left unidentified, the unwary student's mind is easily subverted by that metaphysical neglect.

Understanding that what your knowledge is of, what follows from it, and how you should or should not respond to that, follows from your metaphysical awareness of what is, which leads into an epistemology of causality and logical identification, and culminates with an ethical understanding of that knowledge and how to contextually behave in regards to it. That is not what Bloom's Taxonomy intends by 'Remember', and if it were, then the base of this learning pyramid would begin with, or at least be subdivided into, what it is that the student is learning about, how they can reliably recognize that is true, and why it's important to remember that and what they should or should not do in regards to it.

That conception of what Knowledge is, cannot be contained by 'mere remembering' in the 'lowest level of the cognitive domain', and consequently those promoting 'Critical Thinking' as follows from Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning, must either avoid or ridicule any traditional materials that convey more than that, so that they can teach students 'How' to arrive at 'answers' which 'everyone knows!'. They do so by asserting that what pragmatically 'works' is 'true enough' (meaning what you're able to get away with... at the moment), and so ignore in practice (and deny in theory) any necessary connection between the reality of what is real and true, and requiring students to be relentlessly quizzed & tested about what remains afloat on the surface of those narratives as 'facts', 'Critical Thinkers' are trained to 'Remember' to think with what they've been told to remember (hi Fichte!).

What follows from 'remembering' such 'Knowledge In Name Only', is an 'understanding' that rests upon nothing (nihilism being the natural underlying 'ism of all ideology), and cares only for the significance of who, or how many, have said it. The aspirations that form from that flux become the origins of 'higher-order thinking' that have gotten beyond 'right and wrong' to become the capstone of Bloom's Pyramid of Learning, by divorcing its thinker's mind from reality. From top to bottom, Bloom's 'pyramid of learning' inclines those who've learned 'How to think' through its structure, to eagerly speak of the importance of an "original whole" that's spun from words with no known reference in reality, apart from what they were led to 'creatively' think it could be.

The metaphysical vacancy of Bloom's 'Pyramid of learning', fosters the growth and spread of such mental weeds amongst the teachers of 'Critical Thinking', as the notions that criticizing '2+2=5' could be hampering their creativity, as well as insisting that 2+2=4 is a means of imposing whiteness, as well as engineering society with 'investing' $9,000 in stay-at-home moms, each of which illustrates 'Critical Thinking's operating theme for building ideological castles in the air, by boldly claiming to be getting something, from nothing.

The roots of these weeds that are overrunning our discourse today, run all the way back to Rousseau (and further still), and are what you'll see endlessly repeated in 'Critical Thinking's goals, where its students are always promised to be 'becoming' great 'Critical Thinkers', even as their employers complain that they're never actually achieving anything like that in 'the real world', which are quickly met with strident excuses of 'Well of course you don't see it yet, we need more testing! We need more Programs! We need more funding for Critical Thinking to be taught in our schools!'.

The real wonder is not that 'Critical Thinking' builds castles in the air, but how people fail to see that those castles are being built 'up there', as a means to subduing them down here, for believing that you can build foundations in the air, effectively takes away the ground from under your own feet.

How they get away with doing that, is what we'll get into in the next post.