Critical Condition

Replacing Critical Thinking with Creativity

Patrick Finn

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781771121576
• eBook ISBN: 9781771121583
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Should we stop teaching critical thinking? Meant as a prompt to further discussion, Critical Condition questions the assumption that every student should be turned into a "critical thinker."

The book starts with the pre-Socratics and the impact that Socrates' death had on his student Plato and traces the increasingly violent use of critical "attack" on a perceived opponent. From the Roman militarization of debate to the medieval Church's use of defence as a means of forcing confession and submission, the early phases of critical thinking were bound up in a type of attack that Finn suggests does not best serve intellectual inquiry. Recent developments have seen critical thinking become an ideology rather than a critical practice, with levels of debate devolving to the point where most debate becomes ad hominem. Far from arguing that we abandon critical inquiry, the author suggests that we emphasize a more open, loving system of engagement that is not only less inherently violent but also more robust when dealing with vastly more complex networks of information.

This book challenges long-held beliefs about the benefits of critical thinking, which is shown to be far too linear to deal with the twenty-first century world. Critical Condition is a call to action unlike any other.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: An Invitation
• Chapter 1 A Foolish Question: Isn’t It Time We Replaced Critical Thinking?
• Chapter 2 The Baby and the Bathwater: The Birth of Critical Thinking
• Chapter 3 A Hitch or Two: Polemic, Violence, and the Case for Critical Thinking
• Chapter 4 We Can’t Go On Together (with Suspicious Minds)
• Chapter 5 An Immodest Proposal: Let’s Replace Critical Thinking with Creative, Loving, Open-Source Thought
• Chapter 6 “Sure, It Works in Practice, but Will It Work in Theory?”
• Chapter 7 Conclusion: An Open Invitation – Some Final Ideas and Questions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index