Against "Critical Thinking"; Or, the Disastrous Divorce of Form and Matter

From time to time, I might post some brief reflections on the decade plus I’ve spent teaching, at both the high school and college level (not to mention the time I spent giving private cello lessons, mostly to younger children). I want to do this mostly for my own sake — this is my blog, after all — in large part because I find myself, more and more, at odds with the prevailing winds of education.

Today I want to briefly sketch my objection to one of the supreme clichés of contemporary education, namely that of the importance of “critical thinking,” a phrase usually deployed in contradistinction to an education that emphasizes learning facts via memorization. Students, the story goes, don’t need to spend their time absorbing dates and names and places (to take the example of history class); what they need is to develop skills that will let them critically evaluate whatever material they encounter in life. Sometimes this is paired with the suggestion that such a training will disrupt an outdated form of education rooted in factory style, one size fits all education, whilst also preparing students for the global realities of our technology driven future. Most important of all, this emphasis on critical thinking will teach students how to think, not what to think.

I don’t have the space here to thoroughly dissect or rebut these sentiments, but I do want to offer some reasons I find them misguided. But first, a confession: I have, at points in my pedagogical career, leaned into this preference for “critical thinking” over fact learning. Because of this, I actually have a good deal of sympathy for the motives most educators have when they call for this overthrow of facts by “skills.” Having passed through the fires of the fad, though, I know there are some serious problems with it.

1. Historical distortion and unintended consequences.

It’s simply not true, as many “critical thinking” advocates argue, that fact learning and memorization are products of an education system tooled to meet the needs of industrial capitalism. In fact, as Thomas Pfau pretty brilliantly details in his book Minding the Modern (read it if you have the spare time to down a dense, 700 page work of intellectual history), the gradual drift of intellectual life over the last 1000 years in the West has been toward deracination, a detachment of learning from life. Pfau is mostly concerned with the divorce of reason from will, but I think his analysis ports fairly well onto the division between facts and skills or, as we might call them, matter and form. Even if not: memorization has been a critical component of learning for, well, as long as humans have taught and learned; it’s simply inaccurate to ascribe a concern with memorization to a desire to create industrial drones.

The historical irony here is that it is actually the emphasis on “critical thinking” unmoored from a grounding in received knowledge that prepares workers for life in industrial capitalism and, now, the post-industrial world of “knowledge work”. What better to prepare people for a world of replaceable parts and interchangeable workers than an education that has about it not the barest whiff of specificity? Think of it this way: the ancient bards who could recite from memory both The Iliad and The Odyssey carried within them something grounded in the specificity of culture, time, and place — they were in some important sense untranslatable as figures in their society. A person who’s been taught how to butcher up a Wikipedia page into its constituent parts to extract the “main points” of the Civil War, or the tufted titmouse, or the evolution of navigation instruments, can be shifted around from place to place, a frictionless cog in a vast machine.

2. Intellectual malpractice

In the end, the bigger issue I have with “critical thinking” focused education is that it produces students who are slick, clever, and unwise. I’ve taught many of them, especially during graduate school, since my institution drew from an elite undergraduate base. These students, I’ll say again, were unfailingly clever. They knew the exact rhetorical and intellectual moves to make to show me that they understood, were in the know, had critical thinking etched into their skulls. Unfortunately, the form this took most often was this. I’d present a text of some sort. Instead of absorbing and discussing the text holistically, these critical thinkers would find pressure points in the text, then move to show how the text represented some (usually bad) ideology. Ironically enough, given the mantra that critical thinking teaches students how to think, not what to think, the answers always came out roughly the same. The performances of thinking evinced by my students carried with them the slickness of repeated practice. Without the resistance given by the stubbornness of facts that won’t budge, that refuse to be moved by our cleverest appeals to the “right way” of thinking, these students merely engaged in a pantomime of thought, where the end was utterly visible from the beginning.

What’s especially awful about this style of “learning” is that it produces cynicism in students. “Critical thinking” that always produces the same results leads to students who understand how to game the system, know full well they are doing so, and hate themselves and the system for it. It’s too broad a statement to say that this cynicism and rote performance is true of all elite education in the contemporary moment, but it does seem rampant enough that its malign influence has spread widely. Whatever else can be said of the Classics department at Princeton announcing recently the dropping of any language requirement for their major, it does their students a grave disservice by severing them from the specificity of the languages which they would require facility with in order to really understand that which they study. I love reading The Iliad in English, but I know in doing so I get 1/100th of the nuance I would from reading it in Greek.

Obviously there’s also danger in the opposite extreme, the learning of facts without thinking, matter without form. But let’s not pretend our students are in any danger of that at the present moment. What’s needed is a re-invigoration of form by matter, an infusion of facts and specificity. Such an infusion would make education more difficult, for both students and teachers. But, as my wife and I have found as we home school our kids, children are in fact quite good at memorization, and take to it easily, whether it’s Latin grammar or facts about whale sharks. The absorption of facts en masse stimulates them to wonder and excitement, not dreariness. And such memorization, while it can’t stand as the final goal of education, can act as a foundation on which to build — and without which building would be foolish indeed.