"Critical Thinking" and School Re-Openings
It's still not a thing.
Somebody or another in my academic social-media universe shared out this nice essay in DAME from Kate Harding titled “Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?” which I subsequently saw linked three or four times. It’s on the long side for the Internet, and wanders through a few different topics, but the key bit concerns a book excerpt from Heather Havrilesky that had a viral moment as the target of outrage from people who took it overly literally. This leads Harding to identify what she calls “the most fundamental question of textual analysis— ‘Does this interpretation make any fucking sense at all?’”
This is couched in a larger lament about the loss of any ability to deal with ambiguity in writing or argument these days. People on the Internet want everything to be spelled out for them, and will default to interpreting even text that’s pretty clearly meant ironically as if it were a perfectly literal statement of the author’s beliefs. Particularly if that affords them an opportunity to get spun up into something approximating righteous indignation.
Because I’m the sort of egotist who maintains a blog, this made me think of something I wrote— specifically, the first substantive post I did on this Substack, titled “Critical Thinking Isn’t a Thing”
I think what I’m talking about there is closely related to the problem that Harding is identifying, but with a difference in emphasis. I think we’re talking about a similar kind of breakdown, but the point I would emphasize is that the issue here is not a lack of education or a breakdown in intellectual skills. Quite the contrary— a lot of the “lousy reading and thinking” Harding inveighs against is actually quite sophisticated in a technical sense. In many cases, people are deploying a formidable array of academic skills in the course of their analyses, but they’re failing at a really fundamental level— forgetting to step back and ask “Does this make any fucking sense at all?”
As I said in that earlier piece, there’s a lot of talk about “critical thinking” in academia, particularly in the weird and intense corner occupied by the liberal arts colleges where I’ve spent most of my life. What exactly this phrase means is a subject of active debate, but operationally it pretty much boils down to some collection of analytical skills to be deployed when encountering some new text or claim. The precise mix of skills involved, and whether they include math or not, depends on who you ask, but almost everyone would agree that “critical thinking” involves a set of tools for parsing and assessing new situations.
The aspect of this that I find frustrating, which I tried to express in that earlier piece, is that the failures we see in our public debates are not a matter of insufficient sophistication in the analytical and rhetorical skills that people are bringing to bear on the issues of the day. The failure is more fundamental, at something much closer to the level of Harding’s “Does this make any fucking sense at all?”
This frustration is exacerbated by some of the rhetorical flourishes that accrete around discussions of “critical thinking,” especially in the liberal-arts-education context. In particular, there’s a tendency to tout our brand of schooling as a method— perhaps even the best method— for learning to deal with a complex and ambiguous world. Which is a lovely idea and arguably a noble goal, but not what this is used for in practice.
What we see all too often in practice is the impressive array of analytical skills that form the operational core of “critical thinking” being deployed not to embrace uncertainty, but to manufacture certainty. For all the talk about complexity, the end result of “critical thinking” as practiced by many of its most enthusiastic advocates is an artificial and brutal simplicity: there is only one acceptable answer, and anyone who does not agree with it is either an idiot or a moral monster.
Harding’s essay does a lot of smart things, and one of the smartest is making the centerpiece of the argument the kerfuffle over Havrilesky’s book excerpt, something that was noisy but ultimately inconsequential. It allows the core point— that modern debates, particularly online, often descend into place that make no fucking sense at all— to come through with a minimum of toxic culture war baggage. This stands in stark contrast to the very dumb thing that I am about to do.
That is, I was thinking about this not just because it happened to bob to the top of the flood of thinkpieces that wash over me daily, but because in a lot of ways it clicks with issues that are top of mind right now. Specifically, the re-opening of schools after the New Year. My kids started back in person last Monday, like many but by no means all K-12 students around the country, and Union is starting in-person classes today. And suffice to say, neither of these is without controversy.
I’ve largely been staying out of the campus debate (which I’m sure is both a surprise and a relief to many of my colleagues) mostly because I’m on sabbatical this year, and thus don’t really have “skin in the game”— I won’t be up in front of a class lecturing no matter what the college does. I’ve been a bit quieter than usual regarding the national K-12 situation, as well (not that anyone’s holding their breath waiting for me to weigh in), because as the current Omicron-variant surge is approaching a peak, both K-12 schools and institutions of higher education are faced with a situation where all the policy options suck, but one of them has to be chosen. This is exactly the kind of complex and ambiguous situation in which subtle choices of values and priorities can lead to different outcomes: there genuinely are no clear and simple answers.
But, of course, that doesn’t stop or even meaningfully slow the process of deploying “critical thinking” to generate clear and simple answers. And to demean the reasoning and character of anyone who comes to the opposite conclusion. Often without taking a second to consider whether what their arguments imply about the beliefs and morals of people on the other side makes any fucking sense at all.
The whole thing is just incredibly depressing, leavened only by a kind of accidental black comedy as people from one political pole end up contorting themselves into supporting positions normally associated with the other. It bums me out here on the sidelines; I can’t imagine how it must feel for the people who have to make and own the actual policy decisions. The least I can do for them is to (mostly) keep my mouth shut.
This is one of those posts where I’ve probably written around things enough that it won’t read as an outrageous shot at anyone, but also enough that nobody will respond at all. Anyway, it at least gets this out of my head enough that I can maybe do something useful. On the off chance that this clicks with you, here are some buttons:
And if I’m wrong, and this does spark outrage, well, you can presumably find the comments.
I debated putting this in the actual text of the post, but it didn't quite fit the tone I was going for. But if you'd like a more colorfully polemical version of something like the same thing I'm saying here, I'll direct you to Freddie deBoer:
"What drives me wild about this is that topic is discussed in the exact same witless and condescending tone as every other topic that’s been sucked into the maw of culture war - so many of the people who think we should close schools can’t be bothered to say “you know, this is really complicated, I think the calculus points towards keeping kids home for the greater good, but there’s no good option and it’s going to be incredibly hard on our most vulnerable kids.” No. Every fucking last issue has to be obvious to everyone at all times. There’s no such thing as a hard choice anymore, because to say that choices are hard is to suggest that the other side might have a point about something, anything, and we can’t have that. And everyone has to broadcast savvy at all times. You can’t be curious or questioning or conflicted or haunted by anything, because if you are, you don’t appear to be one of the endlessly bored, extravagantly haughty know-everythings who define our current discourse. We are dying from knowingness."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-kids-dont-have-a-warm-safe-healthy?r=l2cif&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
(As is often the case, he takes the broader post in directions that I don't entirely agree with, but I enjoy his way with invective.)
I find a great thought experiment when I have the impulse that my opinion is obviously right, is to think about if I was a policy maker. What would the objections be to this policy opinion? What are the actual real world consequences?
I found Freddie’s piece to be moving because it was written from the perspective of someone for whom a school closure would’ve been absolutely devastating. I think the answer is both: schools need to stay open for a lot of reasons, and schools need to be closed for a lot of other reasons. It’s quite the pickle.
I guess if I were a policy maker, I’d try to come up with good (preferably cash) incentives for teachers who were willing and able to continue coming to school for those kids who need to keep coming to school. And everyone else stays home.
In our district, though, just a few days ago the superintendent announced a $16million “miscalculation” in the budget that has essentially erased the possibility of teacher raises this year. Oof. That is, how you say, shit timing.