I’ve recently written about how ‘elite thinking’ has taken over Ed. to morph it into a universal problem-solver or silver-bullet for global problems. Now, how does that same thinking manifest inside Ed. itself? Simply by uber-emphasizing problem-solving ‘skills’ - more commonly (now) known as ‘critical thinking’. This often phrased as teaching How to think, not What to think.
Let's lay waste to the big sacred cow of ed-speak.
Critical thinking = How, not What to think.
This is at first glance, too obviously virtuous to doubt.
And at a long glance, too superficial [misguided and misguiding] to enjoy such esteem.
Insofar as this problem participates in magical thinking:
The line from alchemy to utopia is a waste of time. And it's partly the reason why education has gone from merely being a Big Joke [of questionable value] to going Big Woke [doing more harm than good].
The big bullet is the elite thinking of Ed. as a silver bullet to usher utopia [the elixir of life]. The little bullet is the alchemy towards a critical-thinking mode inside Ed., to turn its distinct heterogeneity into homogenous gold [making the philosopher's stone].
Alchemical thinking, to transform Ed. from a mere ‘base metal’ into pure ‘critical’ gold,
Then:
Utopian thinking, using golden/philosopher’s stone from Ed. to heal the world, with the Elixir of Life - ‘Sustainability’.
This is the Noxious Two-Step of Ed.’s inner-alchemical and outer-utopian ethos. The double-barrel silver bullet, critical-sustainability.
My first article for Woke Watch Canada had one comment that inspires this piece:
“Many interesting and important points. I wonder if you could expand on the meaning in ‘Much later did it occur to me that transferring or transmitting knowledge was the heart of education.’ Many of us (including me) believe the most important knowledge to be transmitted is HOW to think, not what to think. In other words: critical thinking and analytical skills. So while there is much (true not false) information that needs to be learned, that’s not always the core of it. Could you clarify your thoughts on this.”
And I’ll include also a reply to that comment:
“That is a good point. I believe there must be a balance. Without a baseline of knowledge, it is difficult to think critically. A child needs guidance and boundaries. Their brains are not as developed for analytical and critical thinking until they become teenagers. As the child becomes older and gains more basic knowledge, the ability to think critically and analytically rises, and can be developed by a good teacher. The irony is that in current education practices, children ARE told what to think, for example, that there are no sexes and a person can identify either as a boy or girl or in between, that the people formerly known as pioneers were colonialist settlers, that Canada was a Garden of Eden before the arrival of the Europeans, that Indigenous wisdom is as valid as Scientific reasoning, etc.”
What we need, first, is a defence of What - to avoid a retreat into How. More on this below.
Critical seems only means ‘good’ in the context of critical thinking, so critical thinking usually only signifies good thinking. We imagine ‘uncritical’ [read: bad] thinkers as a problem we are here to solve. Yes, education has taken a very brave stance that it is for good and against bad thinking.
How does one teach How to think?
“I had students who couldn’t or didn’t think, then I taught How to think, and how they’re all (good) thinkers” – No. We have to stop thinking about education in these alchemical terms, where the teacher is the Ubermensch of ushering in utopia.
We are much better off thinking of the uneducated not as ‘not-yet critical’ but as ignorant, simply because we’ve not yet educated them, education that runs from socialization into erudition - of which schooling is one part. Since Ed. has adopted a Rousseaian view of The Child as Divine, perfect from nature, ‘you’re perfect just the way you are’ - we do not think of the as-yet uneducated as ignorant. We should. We might otherwise think of the child as a born-criminal, insofar as babies are not ‘law abiding’ - and so need to be taught.
Ed. is a complex inter-relationship of Whats & Hows. Note I will keep using these terms, referring to the notion of “Teaching How not What to think” as capitalized What and How. Teaching How is thought of as good/critical while What is bad/uncritical teaching. This interrelation is forgotten, but is being slowly recalled.
The best novice apprentice is humbled before known-knowledge, with an uncritical baseline of accepting ‘I know I don’t know’. Attend to your better-educated and experienced teacher, to gain in the experience of education. But in a world where every institution is an ‘oppressive yoke’ to be cast off, we end up with a generation of cast-aways. Because we didn’t love them enough to give them the best of our world. We rely upon education as transmission because it is a time-honored way to curb cultural decay, through intergenerational renewal. No transmission, no renewal; no renewal, no way to curb decay. Instead we uncritically accepted that we ought to fixate on the very worst of our world, and expect students to do the same - thus we exempt ourselves from our own prime directive.
What I’m talking about, with transmission, is much more than true information. Transmission is the Arnoldian et. al. invitation into an intellectual inheritance of the culture of civilization.
While the larger of the article will address the first comment, above, I’ll address the second one first, now, briefly:
Without a baseline of knowledge, it is impossible to think critically – because otherwise what are you thinking critically about? Something you don’t know? We end up with a lot of guesswork and facilitate a culture of amatuer-ish-ness.
A child needs guidance and boundaries. Their brains are not as developed for analytical and critical thinking – Not only that, but children are impressionable (gullible, but trusting). This is essential, they’re literally ‘dependents’ - thus not independent enough for free and open intellectual inquiry. And because they’re so impressionable they cannot be ‘critical’ - it forms a contradiction. Anyone who wants to believe what you tell them is perceptive and also receptive, it probably all falls under the broader category of innocence. They’re too innocent to be skeptical, or critical; and too inexperienced to be discerning. This is a great advantage to Born teachers, an uncritical but trusting pupil is ideal; though it raises the stakes on the veracity (as habitual truthfulness) of What we teach.
The irony is that in current educational practices, children ARE told what to think – precisely. The rise of the critical thinking revolution in education has been well underway for decades, having taken the place of knowledge. It may seem logical, following the ‘teach a man to fish’ parabical wisdom. Kids don’t need a lot of knowledge if they’re great thinkers they can forever access any and all knowledge directly. Now, the irony becomes tragedy: we stopped doing something we know how to do, but didn’t value, to do something we don’t know how to do, but were led to value more. We were swindled. We don’t know how to ‘make’ critical thinkers, or make anyone ‘think critically’ – and so we don’t have the fruits of critical thinking, all the while kids become less knowledgeable.
If the woke can slap a ‘critical thinking’ label onto their Critical Pedagogy/Theory in perpetuity, they will win. Now, in a deeper sense, yes, of course I have an affinity for critical thinking ... because everyone does. Of course I have an affinity for: team ‘em ‘How to’ not ‘What to’ think. But this is the false dichotomy of an excluded middle. Because we are not always doing either one of these two things. While we think this slogan works to our benefit, it ultimately doesn’t. Because there are essentials. How to read is an essential. When you teach a kid to read it doesn’t fit into either box, it’s not ‘how to think’ – every kid can think, we are endowed with reason as human beings. Nor is it what to think, in a prescriptive or heavy-handed sense. So, what is it? It’s just what it is, it’s learning to read, it's essential.
Critical pedagogy also seems obsessed with literacy, but it isn’t. Literacy is purposefully vague, so when they’re talking about the importance of literacy they mean critical literacy but they really mean political literacy in Freiere’s sense, they mean Marxism – they mean Critical Theory.
They will use things you care about, in ways familiar to you, to distract you with the left hand while they go about doing what they really want with the right. Misdirection, it’s a trick as old as time. The utter domination of the current paradigm [or, monopoly of critical pedagogy] makes us think this way, we're all useful idiots.
We need Born teacher-centered teachers who humbly confess to teach their own subject: I just teach math.
Not ‘made’ student-centered teachers who boldly declare to, instead, teach ‘critical thinking’.
We've been duped. I'm sorry to say. A content-rich or knowledge-based curriculum that transmits knowledge was removed on this basis. There's no such thing as critical thinking, I mean, as above: you just mean good thinking right? As opposed to bad thinking? What's an example of non-critical or uncritical thinking? Usually what is meant is just being obedient, as in …
Uncritically accepting and doing what you're told.. like following rules without asking why. Well, sure, but that's not thinking at all... It sounds so seductive.. so using 'how to think/critical/analytical' rhetoric we can gut the whole curriculum and then we're free to do... something else. So we can ask, and I'm not being adversarial here: Ok so how exactly are you teaching kids to think? I mean what does that even mean? Don't they already think? Don't they need something to think about? Two examples: 1. You're an apprentice to a trade, the expert starts explaining, but instead of listening dutifully you're going to exercise your critical thinking. This would be a predictor of failure, not success. Example 2. There's an upcoming debate and you’re predicting who might win. One debater really knows a lot about the topic, has studied it for years and possesses facts and even has written books about it. The other debater is an excellent critical thinker… I know who I’d bet on.
Teachers should be classroom leaders, the decisive element, and students should follow the teacher’s lead. They may tell you that is not ‘critical’ - but because they also don’t care about chaos, you should ignore them. The cultists of critical thinking are indifferent to real concerns about order and chaos. Because they imagine order to hinder criticality, a cardinal sin. They’re blinded to the obvious truth that the best thinking of the best thinkers thrive in predictable, orderly, more scholarly/academic spaces.
It is probably true that excessive order can limit creativity, which they [critical pedagogues] rarely distinguish from criticality. They completely ignore the problem that excessive disorder ALSO limits creativity. But due to their political commitments they’re essentially anti-order, because order implies the existing order of the status quo, which they’re against [i.e. cis-heteronormative white supremacy etc.]
I think suspcios about critical thinking began as the ‘problem solving’ racket, in Rieff’s phrasing. The problem: we end up gutting curricula of any knowledge, kids become less knowledgeable. This, on paper, could be a trade-off for less knowledge with more critical thinking - it may be worth debating. But you may have noticed that educational changes over the past century tend not to be debated, nor is a consensus sought, but implemented in top-down fashion by ideologically driven pedagogical ‘experts’. If there were such a debate, this knock-down argument might have been made: there is no critical/creative thinking that is devoid of knowledge. The trade off is a losing proposition. Without a knowledge-base the best we can hope for is critical thinking about critical thinking itself, going round n’ around.
Seriously grappling with the What means addressing the issue of What in terms of teacher authority. It is essential to teach True things, that is the best way to think of What>How. Thus we need to think of this ‘teach How not What’ in terms of truth, too. The line can easily be amended to say ‘I teach how to get to truth, not truths’. This is pretend. It really means that every kid should be a philosopher - in the strict sense of ‘an activity’ that maintains its ‘innocence’ via ignorance of philosophy as a discipline. It means to play with ideas you don’t understand.
There’s no way to teach without including What we know. In literal terms there’s no such thing as only teaching How and never teaching What.
It’s true that WW2 was fought in Europe (and N. Africa) and in the Pacific, between the Axis & Allies, from 1939-1945. Sure, this is a ‘where, who, and when’ - but it all falls broadly under the What of teaching history. Ironically, teaching how to think about the war is more subjective, e.g. that the Allies were the ‘good guys’ vs. the Axis ‘bad guys’.
There are Whats in English, about sentences [complete; neither fragments nor run-ons] and paragraphs [point-proof-comment; five-seven sentences] and essays [thesis as main idea, supported by three main points; often in five paragraphs i.e. introduction, three body paragraphs, conclusion]. In teaching I assume the authority of “We” - this is how We learn to write, meaning, this is how it is done. Teachers have to endorse ideas as the best way to think about something, as true Whats, which they can defend.
Teachers must confront rather than flee from their own authority. In Critical pedagogy teacher-authority is a very bad thing, some uncomfortable thing to [pretend to] move away from rather than confront head-on. Instead of learning to wield authority humanely we deny it. The self-denial that “I don’t teach ‘What’ to think” – is a ruse. Because the extent to which we embrace that idea that, yes, we do teach things that are true, this means having to defending that as true. The self-aggrandizement that “I teach ‘How’ to think” at once prevents oneself from giving an account for the truths in one’s teaching, its a distancing from truth and an insulation from defending it, asserting we are ‘doing’ critical thinking full-time. It’s a way to dodge responsible authority and a preparation to defend the Truth of What you teach. The postmodernist teacher who doesn’t ‘believe’ in ‘truth’ is the new model teacher.
Conversely, radical-activist ‘teacher-preachers’ alone assume the role of truth-teller, ‘truths’ that are enforced by aggressive political group-think, ‘truths’ becomes the claims people are too intimidated to question. The truths that float on fear, not those that emerge from discourse and move into consensus become the new What.
Uncritical doesn’t mean ‘bad’ – and clarity is preferable to criticality.
Thinking-critically [as distinct from so-called ‘critical-thinking’] is only productive atop clear understanding, which begins as clear comprehension [understanding is a more complete form, while comprehension is relatively limited - you comprehend parts before you understand the whole]. In other words ‘How to think’ is really only productive following a mastery of ‘What to think’. This wish to skip to the fun part without doing the laborious part will be discussed more below.
Clarity is the rightful gold-standard, not criticality. Teachers must clearly teach ‘What’ to think - but they also mustn’t prevent critical thinking once mastery is manifest, but only then. The notion of actively teaching critical thinking is bunk. Focus on clarity towards understanding; there is no way to be ‘for’ criticality, the best you can do is just not be ‘against’ it - let thinking-critically manifest itself as a passive byproduct not as an active ‘method’ - once the student is ready for it, has earned it through sophisticated experience, its something you won’t be able to stop anyway.
Kids will gain nothing at all from critical-thinking about the Pythagorean theorem. This is a prime example of teaching them What to think in geometry.
…Because you need something to think about. You need to imbibe knowledge uncritically at the outset, and then only slowly and gradually [delicately] you become sophisticated, skeptical, critical. You can interrogate the assumptions or presuppositions of what you’re learning after you’ve learned it, not before.
Consider Bertrand Russell’s advice for studying a philosopher, which I will re-frame as applicable to all learning:
“[T]he right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held.”
Students should suspend easy judgements about loving or hating some topic, they should have a coolly sympathetic view to a new set of ideas; this is like suspending disbelief. How does it feel to think this way, uncritically, and then once you’ve thought your way in (or, ‘buy-in’) and you ‘get it’ - then, be as critical as you want. Otherwise, pseudo-criticality can become an excuse for laziness; being critical of what you don’t (yet) understand has no value. An analogy for the above quote may help: no one wants to watch a movie with the too-clever companion pointing out everything they find ‘unrealistic’ - nor with someone who fawns over every scene as pure genius. The best thing is to suspend snap-judgements and pay attention, and then (cautiously) form some conclusions after the movie finishes.
Consider a different example, taken from S. Zizek [with J. Butler in his sights]:
The ancients: “This is a bottle of tea.”
The postmodernists: ‘If we accept the metaphysical notion of language (clearly) identifying objects, and, taking all this into account then may we not risk the hypothesis that, in the conditions of our language game, this can be said to be a bottle of tea.’
The second one is clearly more critical, right? Or maybe it’s a hodge-podge mirage.
But the first one is clear. That’s the rub. We forgot to emphasize clarity, clear thinking, by being enamored of the party trick of seeming critical. Clarity begins in What to think. It works especially well when one thinks about something someone else thought, first. It's uncritical, which also means: receptive.
Critical thinking becomes a perverse performance, as seen on display everywhere all the time:
‘Due to inherent legacies of ongoing systemic oppression it becomes impossible to situate the lived experiences of bodies without an archaeology of the phenomenological underpinnings of histological inter-relatedness’.
This is how ‘the very smart people’ talk now. No, I really mean: this one way ‘the very smart people’ mock you and then, later, laugh at you. It’s a trick. The trick of critical educationism is to seem to say everything while saying nothing at all.
This is why we postmodern anti-ancients are perverse-wizards; where they created the world out of nothing, we instead create nothing out of the world [to paraphrase Nietzsche].
The humble apprentice lets the wisdom wash over, and does imbibe - and is nourished. Only with the later additions of experience and earned sophistication [or, competence and confidence] does the critical component become productive. The ancients knew that. The Guilds knew that. Then we came along and because we knew better we reimagined and transformed.
What did ancients/Guilds know? A humble apprentice is the best and only point of embarkation. Uncritical in ‘what to think’ is the only appropriate disposition, because it allows for maximal receptivity, based on the assumption of trust - and that trust is maintained by a cadre of grandmasters. Tradition, your teacher’s teachers, ultimately maintain the ‘full faith and credit’ for you to trust in the truth of What must be taught. It is unproductive for the novice to ‘reject’ the grandmaster, the best and only path is to become one first as a pre-condition.
The ‘critical’ emphasis on HOW NOT WHAT to think entails a de-emphasis on WHAT to think, to our shared peril. We cannot avoid the What, and the misdirection into warm-sounding How allows for the What to fall into disrepair. This allows for a kind of unsupervised battle-royale over the new-What while we fix our fetishistic gaze on the How. We do teach What to think. “You don’t hit people” - period. And math teachers teach BEDMAS for a reason. We need to be attentive stewards of the Whats. Unfortunately we’ve been sold a bill of How-goods, and unwittingly ceded the territory of What.
Why not have young self-directed apprentices, 'free' from oppressive masters? A Utopia without mentors of any kind! We may as well experiment in parentless and teacherless children in the name of Liberated Inquiry! The real truth is that this is an act of abandonment, a disinheritance which condemns the young to the howling abyss of an unilluminated present.
Quillete’s Ode to Cryptomnesia
<https://quillette.com/2023/01/30/the-perils-of-progressive-education/>
Highlights from an admirable piece by D. Buck:
-creative geniuses drew on their vast knowledge of their own craft
-great artists develop their capacities through “encounters with others’ artworks,”
-They [creative geniuses/great artists] improved not through practicing any generalized critical thinking skills but through the expansion of their knowledge.
-True creativity requires both domain-specific knowledge and technical mastery.
-“the only way in which critical and creative thinking can be enhanced is by increasing the domain-specific knowledge base.”
-domain specific knowledge needs to be explicitly taught
-To keep our students from rote practice or domain knowledge in favor of more “authentic” writing or performance experiences is to deprive them
The article is so important and so ‘painful’ because it is so obvious, and even more painfully obvious is that we've forgotten the obvious.
Now in our embarrassing cryptomnesia we discover anew what we always knew.
And we dare attach the root word 'progress' to ‘progressive’ Ed. - as a progression into rank barbarism. As if no one dared to think: isn't casting known-knowledge aside a resignation into woeful ignorance? Not if you smilingly say it is critical, creative, progressive. And then say, snarlingly, ‘are you against critical-creative progress?’
Critical consciousness is the death of historical consciousness. Knowledge lost to information. Because behind the scenes wisdom lost to cleverness. The predictable result: disinherited minds. Freed from ostensibly-oppressive authority and long-marched into neo-authoritarianism, educationalists declared: In a world full of wheat, here is the chaff.
…And let slip the dogs of woke: pseudo-therapeutics and political re-education; twin-harnessed and hauling Saint Friere.
Hounds with their corresponding false idols:
Narcissitic-Identity [obsession disorder i] enabling and ennobling
Radicalistic-Activism [obsession disorder ii]
Now, how does all of that correlate to our 'Criticality'? Watery critical thinking education can't possibly fill the entirety of a 20-year education span that’s knowledge-lite. Watery. Sometimes I'll ask students if the pace and workload of a course is too fast/slow or hard/easy. Sometimes high-level students who aren't challenged will say 稀的 [xī de]. 'Xi de' [sounds like she-duh] - it means ‘watery’...In the sense of an innutritious, thin, or low density soup that needs beefing up. Watery as the opposite of rich (in nutrition)... Watery schooling is boring and also doesn’t fill-up hungry young minds. The other problem is that something artificial is bound to move-in to make it ‘less boring’ - having removed the organic sustenance of the What that was.
The byproduct problem
The Critical Thinker is the pot o’ gold at the end of the education’s proverbial rainbow. But it is a byproduct of a career of studentship. It takes a long time, and patience, but it is earned indirectly, or, emerges as a by-product.
Thus, the notion that little kids can be taught how to be critical thinkers is altogether false.
IT’S ACHIEVED PASSIVELY AS BYPRODUCT, NOT ACTIVELY AS PRODUCT – THAT’S THE TICKET!
And that's the beauty and the tragedy. It [Critical-Thinking] was achieved elegantly through time-honored subjects based on apprenticing distinct disciplines [with characterological discipline].
Then we wanted to increase the production of the by-product of an excellent process by making that thing the new [direct] product, and thus by changing the process, naturally breaking it by monkeying around or meddling in things we failed to appreciate. And here we are: we now fail at both the product and the byproduct.
This is the true cost of ‘disrupting’ Ed. And this leads directly into:
The dessert problem
If the final, end-goal of a lifetime of rigorous academic study is to become a critical thinker, then why don’t we skip that whole boring middle part and just directly teach kids how to be critical thinkers? This represents the irredeemable stupidity of re-imagining education. If kids only eat their dinner in order to get dessert, if that’s what they really want, then why not only serve up desserts? Now, my concern is not tooth decay, but rather: cultural decay.
Yes we'd all wish our kids could skip right to the end of a lifetime of rigorous academic study and come to the syrupy sweet part straight away...to become a thinking person with 'critical and analytical thinking skills' that are extremely hard to define...
These great thinkers didn't become great at thinking by practicing ‘thinking skills’ or learning about how to think. The idea that our greatest critical thinkers became so by being taught or studying critical thinking itself, as if it were its own knowledge-domain, is absurd.
Critical-Thinking as a sprinkling works well, looks good, kids love it. But only on some substantive baked good. So when you diverge from a more classic-style of teaching and open the floor to whatever kids think and feel about the learning, it is true that they will alight and say some interesting things. This is often a rewarding (or, validating) experience for the teacher, too. It’s tempting to then want to do more of this, or even to do it exclusively, unless you remember that is divergence that welcomes variety, that is where the value of it lies, not instituting it as the new status quo kills that variety, then students subjected to too much ‘criticality’ wish for enriching instruction but either lack the ability to express it or are quite content to play the critical game.
Skip the baking, stick to sprinkling! They decreed and we all followed. Sprinkle covered donuts are food. Criticality works great to add flair to book-learning, some free form exploration, variety is good. But sprinkle-covered sprinkles is just an unappetizing pile of dyed-sugar. Skip to dessert? And then skip only to the sprinkly-veneer of dessert itself?
Transmitting knowledge is substantial…like a donut (to belabor the metaphor). Allowing for some free-play and welcoming personal thoughts and feelings about that substance is oftentimes a welcome change-of-pace. Why not ask ‘well, if they like this change of pace, and respond to it, why not ONLY do that?’ - Well, I hope the problem is clear.
Crit-washing: the Death of Distinctness
How to muster a robust defense of pre-critical pedagogical practices? Fiercely defend your distinct knowledge-domain, don’t let it be washed through with critical/analytic problem solving ‘skills’ nor DEI-CRT-SEL ‘sustainability’.
“As an art teacher, I teach art. I represent this distinct field in our school - and I transmit art-specific knowledge and practice.”
Once you accept you don't teach art, but critical thinking - you’ve relinquished the autonomy of your teaching practice, and you’ve opened the gates so that you serve and are at the whims of faddish new-think.
And also group-think. The critical pedagogical monopoly means a homogenized teaching practice everywhere. Thus, students increasingly are conditioned into the same ways of thinking and doing - you may think ‘well if they’re all critical thinkers, then they’re all good thinkers, and so that sameness is a good’ – but this is an error. Genuinely thinking-critically does not emerge from constant reinforcement of the same approaches.
Knowledge domain specific transmission is the heart of a resistant pre-critical or ‘complimentary’ pedagogy [see also: Classical or Traditional].
Different teachers in different courses teaching different things in different ways - a more cosmopolitan approach to schooling. Yes, some consensus may exist but it is from the ground-up and remains in a distinct silo, not a top-down dictum to homogenize teaching as such.
The oatmeal-ification of Ed. is nothing to celebrate or congratulate ourselves for overseeing.
A related example is the hijacking of Ed.’s role in citizenship - no longer distinct because ‘nationalism’ is a very bad world. Teachers are all supposed to foster 21st century global citizens.
The monopoly of critical pedagogy advances into practice, no coincidence that ‘critical’ thinking is the gold standard. It doesn’t really want teachers to stop teaching What to think - it wants no rival in new forms of What to think [neo-Whats]. Really it wants to dictate a new set of ‘values’ identifiable as critical consciousness. Every student should see all the world in terms of oppression. Since this is the only way to think, this is evidence of critical thinking - which really means just a critique and a rejection of ‘what is’ i.e. Marcuse’s Great Refusal. There is no viewpoint diversity, as enforced by repressive tolerance. But this whole chain of events starts by moving teachers off of their distinct domains each with its unique history - the most effective way is through soft-coercion in telling teachers they’re ‘doing’ critical thinking teaching instead. And where this fails, any resistance is met with hard-coercive power.
You can’t defend a rival teaching practice without a rival pedagogy behind it. Since there is no rival to Critical Pedagogy, there is no way to defend a rival practice that is not ‘praxis’.
But a rival pedagogy of Classical [pre-critical, complimentary, teacher-centered, traditional or even conservational/conservative] is now emergent. Without a rival pedagogy it becomes almost impossible to defend a non-critical practice that is not an explicit ‘praxis’ of the One True Pedagogy, self-styled as the only game in town.
Critical student-centered monopoly, in Ed. theory advances aggressively via soft and hard power [coercion].
But Good teaching survives by the memory of good practice, and in its rejection [akin to a negation of the critical negation]
But teacher-centered practice is hard-pressed to sustain itself, because it is cut off from pedagogy - because the only pedagogy anyone seems to know is the Critical variety. Again, it styles itself as the only good an installs itself as the only way. One dominant theory, Critical student-centered, advances toward one dominant ‘praxis’ in every classroom. Teachers who don’t see themselves as Critical student-centered teachers won’t be teachers for very long.
When some new pedagogy comes to hijack your teaching practice, you need your own theory with its own telos. This is lacking. But it must be rooted in a noble vision of transmitting the culture of civilization that is every young citizens' rightful inheritance. Full stop.
And since the new Critical Pedagogy is predicated on disruption and transformation it is anathema to this pedagogy and ultimately isolates and preys upon it. Having elided the language over 100 years, teachers don’t have any sense of pre-Critical [compliemntary, classical] pedagogy and thus have no theoretical understanding to fall back upon when defending a non-conforming practice.
This forces you to either go along with it, surrender, or to stand up against it ‘on principle’ that you struggle to articulate in real time, under extraordinary pressure to say it exactly right, why you aren’t committed to politically charged and ideologically loaded ideas, like so:
‘Alright, you don’t want critical pedagogy? You racist sexist transphobe [this really should be all-caps] articulate why, exactly, you object to it, now in this public forum which we’ve sprung upon you.’
If you aren’t going to be both eloquent and articulate in the face of a neo-Inquisitionary force if your practice is cut off from theory. But, if pressed, I think it would have to take this form:
‘Why don’t you do anti-racism?’ Because I am too busy with my subject, art [for example, a convenient three letter subject] - What I am already doing is very important.
They say: ‘more important than anti-racism?’ And the only answer you can give is yes:
‘Yes, my teaching of art is more important to me [than any compelled ideological speech] because I am an art teacher first and foremost. That is my priority, that is my duty, that is what I am here to do - and I know why it is so incredibly important even if you don’t; so that’s your problem. I don’t have to convince you why I should keep doing what I’m doing. And I don’t see any way you can convince me that what you want me to do is more important. Art is culture which is a pillar of civilization and I want my students to be as cultured and as civilized as possible, and this is my humble contribution to that telos. I’m not a revolutionary, I’m not even an activist - especially not when I’m on the clock and on the public dime. I’m committed to what I need to do viz. transmission, not whatever you want me to do viz. transformation.’
While this is an imperfect answer, I’d like to underscore teachers have no natural pedagogical response to articulate what undergirds sound practice.
…And when they say that culture and civilization are racist, you must disagree.
And you resent the fact that they want to call almost anything racist to compel your speech, whereby the only speech will be the sound of submission. If their proposed solution to ‘racism’ limits free speech to dominate public space, you have to refuse it. You don’t agree that is the answer, and you’re free to do so.
Against the Freirian critical consciousness of critical pedagogy, that sees the world and teaches that the world is an oppressive hellscape, we need a better framework to see the world…
Is everything perfect? No, and it never will be. That doesn’t mean oppression is the air we breathe. I reject Freire, and I follow Leibniz: “This is the Best of All Possible Worlds.”
This is the Best of All Possible Worlds and to defend your professional practice you say: “I know what I’m doing.” You know what you’re doing when you’re advancing a tradition. So what is the best defence of your practice which rejects the New Way?
It might just be tradition, but what does that mean? It’s the continuation of a knowledge tradition that passes from generations and renews culture in the best way we know how. You’re teaching kids in the best ways your best teachers taught you [with gradual innovations over very many years] because they [your teachers] had that benefit too – and you’re not empowered to break the chain, you’re just a link in the chain.
Believe that is enough, it is already a noble vision: transmitting the culture of civilization that is every young citizens' rightful inheritance. Full stop.
To deny any young person their rightful inheritance and invitation to the grand banquet of ideas we call The Great Conversation is malpractice.
Transmission is superior to transformation, tradition is superiors to fads, and Leibniz is (obviously) superior to Freire. Moreover, clarity is superior to criticality, pre-Critical [Classical] pedagogy is superior to Critical Pedagogy, and teacher-centered approaches are superior to student-centered ones.
The fact that adopting this way of thinking will get you fired is a legal and a political problem, which I won’t go into here.
Coming back to the main topic, Critical Thinking, there are at least two other ways
Critical Thinking doesn’t work.
Teaching Critical Thinking doesn’t work as a course, nor as a meta-course.
Teaching Critical Thinking doesn’t work as a course because it isn’t a well-defined knowledge-domain.
Teaching Critical Thinking is (instead) installed as a meta-course to be infused in every course, making distinct domains increasingly homogenous. Note that DEI diversity is opposed to viewpoint diversity.
So what should you teach, as a teacher? A good question with a simple answer…
The answer was always forever clear: what you know. You need expertise both to teach and also to judge the content-mastery of students.
If you really know a lot about Critical Thinking “CT” for short, and you know how to show or explain it to pass it on, then it seems fine. But we don’t have genuine CT experts, we have critical grifters. And again: Teaching Critical Thinking doesn’t work as a course because it isn’t a well-defined knowledge-domain.
Every single teacher should teach this same one thing i.e. critical thinking. It’s an orthodox mono-guild slinging the skeleton key to open any door. It’s predicated on magical-alchemical thinking.
The first obvious problem is that CT isn’t a knowledge-domain, but an activity. There’s no history and no major figures nor real experts. The supremacy of a low-knowledge hypothesis entails teachers don’t really know a lot about it nor can it be proved they [we] all know how to do it. This violates the general rule of teaching from a knowledgeable position.
This is the problem with a critical thinking course - it’s not a knowledge domain. It usually becomes an informal logic course, and learning the many logical fallacies is useful. But that is really just a course in the rules of discourse, to recognize bad arguments. But I don’t see the benefit of teaching children that ‘correlation doesn’t equal causation’ - it's a hard distinction to grasp and apply consistently. This (informal logic) excludes formal logic, which I think should follow a foundation in mathematics (viz. algebra). Correlation and causation are different relationships between ideas and events, I don’t see how teaching kids this is even possible without first understanding many ideas and many events - it presupposes too much. Understanding an idea or an event in its own particularities is challenging enough for young minds.
This matter of ‘a course’ to teach critical thinking is however a minor issue. Much more common is the way teachers reinterpret their job as teaching critical thinking, described as teaching how to think, not what to think. On the surface this seems undeniably good. This is described above as the ‘meta-course’ approach to CT.
Problem two: the evisceration of teacher distinctness. We all have to do it. We all teach one thing i.e. “how to think” - right?
So what are the basics, middle iterative stages, and upper reaches of it – so we can progress and track students through it?
Or, No, CT is just the spirit of how to teach everything else…
So why not put the word critical in front of everything? Critical math, critical art, critical everything.
Well that’s what we did. We fell in love with the word critical, and yes, ironically, we did so completely uncritically. And while I defend ‘uncritical’ acceptance in novices and students, professional teachers should genuinely think-critically about their own profession. So how can you teach critically [here the game is lost] without questioning the very presuppositions of what and why you’re teaching it? None of that matters after ‘here the game is lost’ so just go back to that phrase.
The Critical Theorists yanked out the critical thinking rug right under you - you didn’t even notice, because you didn’t know what critical thinking was due to its amorphous nature. Critical is marketing term, with top-down and also self-perpetuating qualities.
The more aggressive form of this ‘every teacher should’ mindset, rooted in critical thinking, also manifests in DEI-CRT-SEL, the best example is CRT, e.g. every teacher must incorporate anti-racism, i.e. the further homogenization of all distinct teaching practices into One. The problem of this sameness is that it is antithetical to heterogeneity, it is the death of genuine criticality and viewpoint diversity, just as it is the silencing of criticism/critique, especially inside of Ed.
-B-
The Neo-What
Teaching ‘What’ is only bad when YOU do it. So you just focus on the ‘How’... But do teach them to be as ‘critical’ as possible, just avoid anything you think is true.
Only ‘we’ can teach the new ‘what’. Of this, no one can be critical. And until you exemplify the correct ideas, you may only teach How. But once you’ve graduated from re-education, you may begin to teach the new What.
Then big-C-Critical gobbled us all up. Every distinct domain forgets what it is, loses confidence, gets captured.
While Ed. started to see itself as How-not-What, a new What entered the vacuum: politics, viz. Identity politics. That is the new What being taught, while workaday teachers are convinced they’ve transcended the What into the pure How. They’ve been effectively mis-directed and so, sidelined.
When they want to revolutionize education, be wary.
And when they do so by appealing to your noblest aspirations as an educator, be very wary
When the first step is to empty curricula it of any rigorous, any exact-and-exacting content based on knowledge… beware.
They don’t want to empty the What in order to facilitate liberal critical/creative free-thinking open-inquiry. They use this misdirection, they really want you to get lost in the CT-How, while they usurp the neo-critical-What.
Every distinct subject teaches both What and How, and always did. The emphasis on How and away from What elides competition for the new political re-education, the new invasive species of What, to thrive unrivaled.
Maintaining the subjects in their distinctness preserves them, yet this is ‘problematized’ because they all also infer certain assumptions, like the scientific method is an implicit threat to lived experience.
Each distinct subject has a history and a tradition of great contributions to civilization (knowledge and culture). To the extent that this impedes cultural revolution, it is regarded as hostile. Every teacher should just teach a variant flavour of the New Theme, critical thinking, which opens the door to all of the other ‘criticals’ through Critical Pedagogy.
The first step in the long march through the institution of education was to repurpose Ed. to solve social problems, in the radical 60’s: What goes on in Universities anyway, why aren’t they putting an end to poverty?
This takes us back to the big silver bullet problem of panacea Ed. or as the elixir of life…
The UN DESD “Decade of Education for Sustainable Development”
“The concept of DESD is context-based and value-laden as it is based on the global agreement in the beginning of a new century to promote learning for sustainability at all levels of education all around the world.”
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-642-28036-8_13
Values, values, value-laden. Value-laden global agreement at all levels.
We would assume that values are a What not a How to think.
But it is in this case a globally-informed Politics as ethics, especially DEI. It is implicitly not the values of parents, nations, nor of individual teachers who might incidentally reflect an assemblage of parental/national values. Until teachers align themselves to the New Way, they ought only focus on a value-less How not a value-laden What to think.
GET THE ‘WHAT’ OUT
CRITICAL PEDAOGY OSTENSIBLY WANTS THE ‘HOW’ AND TO GET THE ‘WHAT’ OUT - IT JUST WANTS A NEW ‘WHAT’ [IT’S OWN]
What is the new What? Revolution.
While teachers are busy congratulating themselves, thinking that they are teaching thinking, teaching ‘how to think’ - the new What has thoroughly captured and re-purposed education for the purposes of re-education.
This brings us back to the worldview problem in critical consciousness and the real effects:
Not only did we not sell them on the greatness of their intellectual inheritance.
We over-sold them on the awfulness of their material inheritance, a world full of hate (racist etc) that is literally dying (climate).
This isn't some grassroots activistic student-culture exuberance, this is terror.
Terrified, mentally unwell, narcissistic. Students become pawns, as know-nothing activists.
Fated to 'end hate' and 'save the planet' in a fell swoop.
Everything is terrible - onset depressive mind.
Save everything, or else - onset anxious mind.
The world will end unless you (yes you, kid!) stop it. They imagine this to be ‘empowering’ when nothing could be more the contrary.
This is how the utopian assumptions, about a bad world in need of saving, harm students in the name of harm-prevention. Children are cast as the vanquishing heroes of an oppressive world.
And how's that going?
I for one do not trust Ed. to solve the mental health crisis. The best we can do is to stop its deleterious or iatrogenic affect, otherwise we’re doomed to forever be mopping up with the tap on.
Again, we need the Leibniziain view, that this is the best of all possible worlds. This facilitates the appropriate level of moderated-ambition: try your best to make your own small contribution to the world. A sane view of the world and of education’s place in it, for the sake of a sane younger generation.
What did Nietzsche’s Soothsayer say? Wise men of every age say of life, it is no good:
“Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good. Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths -- a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.”
All we need do is replace “life” with “the world” or the “status quo” to recognize education in these lines, viz. Critical Pedagogy.
We’ve inculcated, always and everywhere, weary-melancholy [depressive] of and doubtful-resistance [angst] to(wards) the world. The world is no good, trust us, for we are the wisest of our age.
With the left hand, they want to ‘promote’ critical thinking or analytical thinking skills as ‘how to’ not ‘what to’ think. And with the right, indoctrinate along new lines in What to think without opposition. Opposition is dismissed as lacking critical thinking, attacking the ‘method’ of opposed ideas as reaching incorrect conclusions based on faulty thinking processes, as if such a thing could be divined. This is not about using thinking to reach conclusions, it is the assumption that the pre-ordained conclusions are the natural consequence of good-thinking. The ends [correct conclusions] justify the means [critical thinking]. This is of course the opposite of genuinely thinking-critically. The elect are necessarily correct and so must possess critical thinking, see? There is no possibility, in the cultural revolution, to reach different conclusions thoughtfully because those ‘other’ conclusions are [retroactively, reflexively] evidence of bad thinking.
This is one of two ways they can eliminate a content-rich or knowledge-based curriculum.
The other way is to ‘identify’ any such content or knowledge or curricula as bad because it is Western, with Western assumptions about truth and liberty, as evil: racist, sexist, colonial, or ‘-phobic’ in some sense.
So, the How>What has an ideological purpose, to hollow out the old What, and to ‘sell’ this as a critical/How-emphasis, en route to institute new Critical What to think.
Once neo-teachers [activists/revolutionaries] have eliminated everything they might be required to teach, and instill a culture of woke activism, then, with the right hand, they can introduce anything at all – free from accountability or consequence.
This is reinforced by a pedagogy fixated on methods, again on How and not on What you actually teach; on style over substance. Methods-gimmicks is superficially a way to get kids attention, but ultimately takes the ‘normal’ teachers away from thinking about what they’re teaching; while the activist teacher-preachers know exactly What they want to teach, viz. Their own radicalism.
P.S. This is not an original idea, here are two very good articles which share the sentiment, see also:
The Critical Thinking Skills Hoax - Classical Education, by Martin Cothran
And
The Scam of Critical Thinking, by Scott Bigman.
But the purpose of my piece is to make some different points to advance the general idea.