Education, Culture and Critical Thinking

Ken Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138312715
• eBook ISBN: 9780429856488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Published in 1998. Interest in the subject of "critical thinking" has mounted, seeking ways to transcend rote learning and to remedy a widely perceived lack of critical, analytical abilities amongst school students. A growing literature on "teaching thinking" and "problem solving" maintains this commitment, reflecting a common belief that thinking skills of a general nature can not only be identified, but can be taught successfully. The paucity of empirical evidence that intellectual skills thus identified actually transfer between domains of thought or subject matters has done little to diminish faith in the possiblity that this is achievable. The principal message of this book is that theories of critical thinking which disregard its historical origins and dialectical, traditional character are likely to be seriously flawed. All human societies exhibit problem solving abilities, often of a high order - all language and thought is fundamentally criteriological. Relevant distinctions between critical thought and its alternative are found in history and culture, in dialogue and criticism, not just in the operations of individual minds.

The critical traditions embody a sovereign principle - a criterion of the effectiveness of educational institutions to represent the legacy and social liberties and democratic values in which they are deeply enmeshed.

1 Critical Thinking and its Alternatives

Modern education is all cram...The world already knows everything, and has only to tell it to its children, who, on their part, have only to hear, and lay it to rote (not to heart). Any purpose, any idea of training the mind itself, has gone out of the world. Nor can I yet perceive many symptoms of amendment. Those who dislike what is taught, mostly...dislike it, not for being cram, but for being other people's cram, and not theirs. Were they the teachers, they would teach different doctrines, but they would teach them as doctrines, not as subjects for impartial inquiry...Is it any wonder that, thus educated, we should decline in genius? That the ten centuries of England or France cannot produce as many illustrious names as the hundred and fifty years of little Greece? (John Stuart Mill, letter to the Monthly Repository, October 1832, 'On Genius')

Most educational commentators and most of the general public seem to agree on at least one thing: the schools are in deep trouble. Many graduates, at all levels, are characterized as lacking the abilities to read, write and think with a minimum level of clarity, coherence and a critical / analytical exactitude. Most commentators agree as well that a significant part of the problem is a pedagogical diet excessively rich in memorization and superficial rote performance and insufficiently rich in, if not devoid of, autonomous critical thought. (Richard Paul, 1990, p. 102)

The 'Thinking Skills Movement'; a neglected historical dimension

Mill's diagnosis of the malaise affecting the educational methods of his day is significant for many reasons. One of the more obscure but important is his choice of Classical Greece as a standard of intellectual excellence and his implicit assumption that the passage of time had failed to render that example obsolete. Another is the standard set by his own extraordinary educational achievement; the result of a harshly administered but uniquely effective pedagogy devised jointly by his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham to demonstrate the universal potential of methods grounded in a rationalist philosophy. J S Mill's early progress as a critical thinker was a constant focus of interest and debate for an influential group of philosophical radicals. It was also intended by his mentors as a paradigm for 'philanthropists, religious or irreligious, who at this time were obsessed with the idea of reforming humanity by pedagogy' (Halévy, 1952, p. 285). Modern educational debate takes place within a different paradigm and Mill is often portrayed as the isolated subject of a unique educational experiment. In fact he is an important representative of an Enlightenment tradition in which the cultivation of reason came to be identified with the political ideals of individual empowerment through more libertarian and representative forms of government. This tradition, substantially modified and developed by Mill, had deep historical roots and was the outcome of interrelated developments; religious dissent with its conception of spiritual equality between individuals, the accessibility of transcendental purposes to human reason, and the rise of experimental science. More fundamentally, it expressed a predisposition to question traditional authority and to justify critical inquiry in contrast with ecclesiastical emphasis on revealed truth and authoritative interpretation. Hooykaas describes the fusion of these trends, maintaining that the defenders of this developing spirit of inquiry were 'perfectly conscious of the analogy between the liberation from ecclesiastical and philosophical tradition by the Reformation and the liberation of science from ancient authority by the new learning' (Hooykaas, 1977, p. 113).

It is ironic that the passages, above, by Mill and Paul convey identical messages despite having been written more than a century and a half apart. That period has seen not only the emergence of systems of comprehensive, state-maintained education but now, some claim, intimations that those systems are in terminal decline. For Mill, writing at the outset of his prodigious career as a philosopher and social analyst, universal education was still a distant prospect. It was for him the necessary, though not sufficient, condition of a civilised democracy which would realise the egalitarian and feminist ideals of the political tradition to which he was heir. Paul, a major contributor to the contemporary debate about critical thinking, endorses similar democratic values. But he castigates a system of public education which has now been rejected for more diverse reasons by many hundreds of thousands of 'home-schooling' parents in the United States. Disillusionment and a sense of crisis afflict British education, too. An eminent Cambridge educationalist has argued for a dismantling of the now-traditional system in favour of 'an infinite variety of multiple forms of teaching and learning' (Hargreaves, 1997).

Enormous social, technological and political changes have occurred since 1832 when Mill wrote the essay known as 'On Genius', of course. That was the year of the first, hesitant nineteenth-century concession to a growing movement for electoral reform in which Mill's father, James, Jeremy Bentham and their philosophical radical associates played a significant part. Indeed, the idea of universal access to education was supreme amongst James Mill's democratic ambitions, but partly as the result factionalism amongst the reformers themselves about the role of religion in education, and partly because of hostile competition by the established church, Mill's practical educational initiatives collapsed and the most tangible legacy of his ideals and practical energies is the University of London (Burston, 1969).

John Mill's much-debated reservations about the emerging democracy of his lifetime are largely explicable as alienation from a system of schooling in which the ideal of individual, critical autonomy was not only absent, but sometimes explicitly disavowed. In 1840, less than a decade after the publication of Mill's defence of critical thinking in the essay, On Genius, the following instruction was issued to Her Majesty's Inspectors by the Committee of Council on Education. It registers the triumph of an alternative view of educational purpose:

No plan of education ought to be encouraged in which intellectual instruction is not subordinated to the regulation of the thoughts and habits of the children by the doctrines and precepts of revealed religion. (Morris, 1972, p. 283)

I do not claim that the authoritarianism of that agenda has been typical of the subsequent development of educational policies and practices even though there are contemporary resonances in the centralised, hierarchically organised drive by government for higher educational standards. However, it stands in polar opposition to Mill's conception of educational purpose in which maximisation of the critical autonomy of individual students is paramount. One might loosely describe subsequent educational developments in terms of the gravitational attraction of these polarities; emphases alternating between collective social and ethical values and individual needs - or putatively unproblematic ways of reconciling these objectives. But that would miss a vital point about Mill's conception of the dialectic of critical thought. It does not stand on a continuum of pedagogic objectives; it is not an item on an educational agenda; it is the sovereign principle and self-authenticating end of educational endeavour because open ended commitment to the critical appraisal of all values, all notions of social utility, is the condition of their justifiability for fallible human beings (Mill, 1965, p. 273).

Israel Scheffler and Harvey Siegel articulate similarly radical arguments in support of the educational ideal of critical thinking and their contributions to the contemporary debate are important and unusual in this respect. The perspective offered by Mill, however, encompasses the totality of social life and ethics in fine detail and, as I will argue in my final chapter, provides an unsurpassed account of the internal relationship between individual freedom, democracy and critical thinking - and of the dangers of underestimating the internality of that relationship in the pursuit of other social objectives. Moreover, there is an optimism about human intellectual and moral potentials in Mill's philosophy which is now unfashionable; an Enlightenment faith in the power of educated reason to eliminate the gross differentials between individuals, social classes, genders and races (Mill, 1965, p. 160). I will argue that Mill's contentions have not been effectively refuted; they have never been effectively tested.

The language of 'skills' has now invaded all levels of education and threatens to embrace the definition of critical thinking, conveying a spurious sense of the determinacy of this very complex subject and, consequently, of appropriate ways of teaching it. Mill was implacably opposed to the idea that this could be a question of predefined technique or strategy. Critical thinking, above all, enjoins a Socratic commitment to follow the logic of discourse wherever it leads in pursuit of the truth; a view of education in deep contrast with the idea of nationally prescribed curricula, age-related attainment targets and standardised testing procedures. Contemporary education is not only identified implicitly with national economic performance by large sections of the media and the public; its utilitarian, servile role is now recognised explicitly in the title of the United Kingdom's Department for Education and Employment, Such a prioritisation of general social objectives conflicts fundamentally with Mill's conception of the educational ideal of critical thinking and with that of more recent exponents like Scheffler:

...the notion that education is an instrument for the realization of social ends, no matter how worthy they are thought to be, harbors the greatest conceivable danger to the ideal of a free and rational society. For if these goals are presumed to be fixed in advance, the instrumental doctrine of schooling exempts them from the critical scrutiny that schooling itself may foster. (Scheffler, 1973, p. 134)

Paul and Siegel urge recognition of the intimate relationships between critical thinking, rational and moral integrity and democratic values. But in the brief course of their development our education systems have acquired an aura of autonomy and of technical complexity which tends to limit public debate to the means of achieving predetermined educational ends. And these are often taken for granted or accepted as self-authenticating within the framework of national, or even global, social and economic objectives.

Thus, I have chosen to begin and end my argument with Mill because he provides a much-needed 'Archimedian point' beyond the present 'thinking skills debate' and an education system which is widely perceived to be in crisis. More than any of his successors, including John Dewey who is usually celebrated as the philosophical pioneer of critical thinking (for example, see Fisher, 1989, pp. 37-38), Mill challenges popular, instrumentalist views of education and the authoritative status of collectively determined educational ends. His theory of critical thinking is simultaneously an account of the relationship between mind and society, a sustained critique of the authoritarian mentality and of the pervasive influence of that mentality on our social institutions to the detriment of aspirations for personal freedom, justice, social and gender emancipation.

The disinheritance of Mill's ideal

Some distortions in contemporary accounts of critical thinking need to be corrected by an emphasis on its traditional character; a heritage which has been accumulated laboriously and which remains vulnerable; a product of gradual disentanglement from other ways of life and thought. Critical thinking and its alternatives, which I will try to characterise in the following chapters, cannot be comprehended adequately without reference to cultural and historical environments, unless they are to share the obscurity which now surrounds the anthropological distinction between 'logical' and 'prelogical' mentalities. In the absence of this attention to context, definitions of skills of thought are liable to degenerate into scholastic formalisms. Pedagogic techniques derived from them may amount to little more than routine exercises which are a shallow substitute for genuine critical thought. The indefinitely large, expanding body of intellectual capabilities which it subsumes cannot be pinned down by precise definitions; the attempt to do so seems to rest on the misconception that because reasoning so commonly involves the use of rigorous, clearly defined procedures, it therefore must be explained in terms of them. Critical thinking involves, quite crucially, the predisposition to evaluate any accepted rules or procedures. And here it is necessary to make a distinction between an unrealistic (and undesirable) practice involving constant re-evaluation and an institutionalisation of open dialogue in which the possibility of critical appraisal is always implicit.

Thomas Kuhn maintains that the history of science must have some bearing on contemporary science, and that an 'unhistorical stereotype' has emerged, drawn from texts which 'seem to imply that content of science is uniquely exemplified by the observations, laws, and theories described in their pages' (Kuhn, 1970). Similar considerations apply in the case of contemporary efforts to define thinking skills and to identify their characteristics with their formalised products. History or social science, taught without regard to philosophical questions about purpose and method become little more than futile, self-perpetuating exercises. In the physical sciences, too, questions about the meaning, epistemic status and ontological implication of concepts are prior to effective critical thought.

Equally, the idea of critical thinking is seriously distorted by efforts to portray it simply as an activity of individual intellects. Social dimensions of dialogue and debate and the organisational means which have evolved for maintaining them are also crucial in its elucidation, as Karl Popper has argued in the case of the sciences in The Open Society and its Enemies (Popper, 1969). This socio-historical dimension of critical thought is of much more than marginal, antiquarian interest. Mill stressed the intimate connection between the intellectual triumphs of the Greeks and their cultural environment of pervasive disputatiousness. Matthew Lipman, pioneer of philosophy for children, has tendered an explanation, closely resembling those of Mill and Popper, for a 'notorious historical enigma'; Classical Athens and Renaissance Florence were examples of spontaneous communities of inquiry, a concept which is the distinctive organisational principle in Lipman's promotion of critical, philosophical inquiry in schools (Lipman, 1991, p. 73). Yet emphasis on education through a discursive, argumentative search for truth does not represent a flight from social and economic imperatives. It was a prominent feature in many of the 'Dissenting Academies' founded in post-Commonwealth England in reaction to the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (Priestley, 1904). These schools promulgated the new empirical, scientific methodologies. In the 18th and 19th Centuries they contributed to the growth of the physical sciences and technology quite disproportionately to their size and number, confirming the intimate connection between religious nonconformity and scientific innovation which Merton and Hagen have described (Merton, 1979, pp. 20-54; Hagen, 1967, pp. 290-309).

There is a disturbing tendency in the contemporary debate about critical thinking to disregard the laborious development of the critical traditions and to take the question of justification for granted. Siegel maintains that critical thinking should be regarded as a 'regulative ideal' in education and has emphasised that a justification of it is long overdue:

This conception of education, and its role and relationship to the larger society, is a profound one, and indicates the immense depth of the philosophical issues raised by a consideration of critical thinking. (Siegel, 1988, p. 55)

His own 'beginning of a justification' of the educational ideal of critical thinking is couched partly in terms of ethical goals like respect for students, self-sufficiency, initiation into the rational traditions and he discerns an intimate connection between critical thinking and democratic living (Siegel, 1988, pp. 55-61). In important respects he echoes Mill's prioritisation of individual critical independence as a necessary condition for the justification of all other social, ethical or educational ends. Yet one key aspect of Mill's view of critical thinking strikes a discordant note in the context of modern educational theory and practice and is probably overlooked for that reason. This is his belief in the dynamic potential of an education in critical thinking to eliminate intellectual differentials between 'individuals, races or sexes' which were regarded by most of his contemporaries as innate and therefore 'indelible'. He proposed a 'hand-to-hand fight' with the pervasive doctrine of genetically determined mental inequalities, the principal obstacle to the 'unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education' (Mill, 1965, p. 160 and p. 69). The prioritisation of nurture over nature was one of the few of James Mill's philosophical convictions which John Stuart supported without reservation to the end of his life; but there was nothing, he pointed out, 'more contradictory to the prevailing tendencies of speculation...' Gross educational inequalities still persist despite universal schooling, lending some credence to long-established beliefs in the immutability of intellectual differentials - not only between individuals but entire social classes, articulated forcefully in 1867 in Walter Bagehot's classic work, The English Constitution:

The lower orders, the middle orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated "ten thousand," narrow minded, unintelligent, incurious...a philosophy which does not ceaselessly remember, which does not continually obtrude, the palpable differences of the various (social orders) will be a theory radically false. (Bagehot, 1963, p. 63)

There are other subtle reasons why Mill's egalitarian educational ideals may be contrary to prevailing beliefs and theories in modern democracies. Not least amongst them is the formidable influence of psychometrics and, more recently, growing popular interest in genetic predisposition. Moreover, the idea that the characterising features of thought are to be found in determinate operations, the processes of individual minds, rather than in the social matrices of language, dialogue and cultural tradition enjoys support of another kind. Cognitive science and associated philosophical stances known as 'eliminative materialism' and, rather less respectfully, 'methodological solipsism' invest heavily in the idea that mental operations are, in principle, comprehensible independently of the way in which they 'hook up to the world' through human language and intentional behaviour (Churchland, 1992, p. 301). In other words, there is already considerable momentum at both scholarly and popular levels for the conflation of distinct ideas; criteria of rationality; individual proficiencies in the utilisation of those criteria; and determinate structures, processes and psychological skills of thinking.

Although critical thinking might be readily accepted as an educational and democratic ideal by large sections of the educational establishment, important questions remain about its conceptual status and, consequently, its pedagogic and institutional implications. Powerful voices now explicitly subordinate educational objectives to those of economic expediency or tacitly assume an uncontroversial identity between them. The prevalent 'skills conception' of critical thinking is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Thinking and its Alternatives
• 2 The 'General Thinking Skills' Controversy
• 3 Epistemic Bedrock or Logical Quicksand?
• 4 Language and Consciousness
• 5 Side by Side Through Different Landscapes
• 6 Between Our Ears?
• 7 Language, Tradition and Culture
• 8 The Sovereignty of Reason
• 9 Conclusion: 'A Spirit of Adventure'
• Bibliography
• Index