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In debates about education, one topic seems, ironically, protected from challenge: the need to teach and emphasize critical thinking. This may be the only aspect of school, in fact, that all educators agree on. Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth has suggested that students today even assume that “being smart … means being critical.”
While learning how to analyze and critique what other people have thought and done is indeed a necessary skill, we’ve made education lopsided in its name. We analyze carefully more than we explore imaginatively. We close down on our own points of view more than we open ourselves to the points of view of others. Exploratory thinking is barely the warm-up act. Critical thinking is all the show.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that once students leave school, the way they speak about and to one another is charged with strong opinion and critique. That’s what education has trained them to do. We unmask more than we admire. We make judgments before we’ve lingered with possibilities. We think for ourselves and announce what we think before we patiently learn what other people have thought in similar or different contexts. Schools that John Dewey saw as laboratories of democracy have become, in our time, laboratories of critique. That our politics and public discourse share that same skeptical mood should not surprise us. It’s the mode in which we learn.
I’m not the only one to notice this. One of the main characters in Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel Godwin confesses the impact of our educational imbalance:
Being smart—which we confused with being knowledgeable—was less about seeing something for what it was than about critically viewing one’s act of seeing, then critically viewing oneself critically viewing one’s originally seeing self, and so on infinitely, as in an Escher, without vertigo. In practice, it led to abandoning all attempts to actually absorb anything.
Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism similarly questions whether the elevation of critical thinking is sufficient for developing wisdom:
I sometimes wonder whether I (as someone who teaches philosophy as a day job) should always be cultivating skepticism or praising the power of critical thinking. … At this point in history, it is at least arguable that understanding is as important as critique, and patient, kind-hearted, sympathetic observation more helpful than endless personal opinions, as we live in a world entirely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of each other.
We’re lopsided toward critique, as these two writers suggest, but it would be a mistake to try to balance critical thinking with another technical skill. What’s missing isn’t sharper technique. What’s missing is a wider range of lenses. What’s needed is a balancing mode of being in school and in the world. This mode involves openness and generosity—and maybe gratitude. It’s a mode of listening and heeding.
O’Neill’s helpful image in Godwin is absorption. We’re in school to take in frameworks and contexts, ideas and stories that expand our sense of what a full, interesting life entails. We internalize other stories to develop our own. Absorption requires receiving accounts of the world on their own terms first. It requires checking the impulse to always suspect and unmask.
In Mysticism, Critchley’s alternative to critique involves a quest for understanding that comes on the far side of sympathetic observation—sympathy, not suspicion, being the key. Jane Addams called this approach “affectionate interpretation.” We may get to critique as we study new things, but in this picture of education, we don’t start there. We start with openness. In this mode, seeking to understand is not simply prelude to the critical thinking to come. It is a worthy mode on its own terms. Critique crouches with a shield and a sword. Understanding sits quietly with binoculars and a journal. Education develops the skill and the judgment to know how to move between those modes.
What the images from O’Neill and Critchley have in common is that they see education not as an instrumental process but as a formative one. Education is less about acquiring skills you can use than about becoming a certain kind of person who moves through the world a certain way. To become a full, mature, interesting, wise, decent, curious, empathetic, engaged person is to be someone who, first, and most of all, has learned to listen and take in. We don’t want students to become robots or conformists. We very much want them to be independent thinkers. But you become your own full person by first absorbing the possibilities other people have explored. Then you turn those possibilities into your own version of a life well lived. You choose a path, and you start down it, your head and your heart full of the company of the lives and ideas you’ve sat with and pondered. When school is organized around skills, even those as important as critical thinking, it can feel like a grinding assembly line of acquisition. It should feel more like a road trip.
Critical thinking shouldn’t be displaced. It should just be slowed down. We tend to hurry students through encounters with texts and ideas in order to get to the part where we critique. We’re rushing through the richer stage of absorption. We rush in good faith: We think a 21st-century education requires practicing strong critical thinking. But if that mode isn’t balanced by listening and heeding, by generosity and curiosity about how other people frame and experience the world, we will continue to respond too quickly with criticism before we understand if that’s the mode the situation really requires. We see this playing out in all aspects of our common life, but it begins with the elevation of criticality in school.
The failed schoolteacher Henry David Thoreau is one of my heroes, but I confess I misunderstood him for years. I always had an image of Thoreau walking through the woods beating on a metaphorical drum, heedless of what anyone thought, full of critique about the shallow lives of others. There are plenty of lines in Thoreau that justify that picture of him. But late in life, I realized that I had misunderstood Thoreau, and that I had misread especially the well-known clarion call from Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Thoreau’s archetypal nonconformist here is not actually banging a drum at all, as I’d always thought. His hero is simply listening. It’s relevant that he’s not listening for arguments to engage with but for music to step to. He’s also listening very carefully because the music is far away. That should resonate with students everywhere. Life seems far away when you’re young. What can you do? Thoreau’s answer is quiet and wise: You can take your time, and you can listen. Wait for the distant music that draws your attention. There’s a lot of noise around you, and that’s not going away. It’s going to take some work to be attentive. Do that work. Before you rush to form a strong opinion, listen. The world is bigger than you and your critical powers anyway. Listen so that your context for understanding that world becomes dense and subtle.
If education can do that part well, if we can help students cultivate patient habits of listening and absorbing, they will be ready also to begin to think critically. They need that too. But first they need to experience school as a laboratory of understanding.
