I had ended the last post implying that African universities despite their challenges, really need to work hard to ensure that students, at the very least become critical thinkers on graduation. Without intending to offend anyone, it is important that it be pointed out that while thinking is a natural process, excellence in thinking is not. It has to be strenuously cultivated. Thinking, left to itself, it is often biased, distorted, partial, uninformed, and potentially prejudiced. The rigorous process of cultivation necessary to avoid all these flaws is what fashions undisciplined thought into critical thinking. We have seen what critical thinking is not, perhaps we should now look at what it is.
Critical thinking is, very simply stated, the ability to analyze and evaluate information. Critical thinkers raise vital questions and problems, formulate them clearly, gather and assess relevant information, use abstract ideas, think open-mindedly, and communicate effectively with others. Passive thinkers suffer a limited and ego-centric view of the world; they answer questions with yes or no and view their perspective as the only sensible one and their facts as the only ones relevant.
Critical thinking is different from just thinking. It is metacognitive, meaning that it involves thinking about your thinking, in order to make your thinking better. Unfortunately, societal norms often make it hard for people to develop critical thinking skills. Critical thinking is simply not a typical response to societal problems. What tends to happen is deference to tradition, elders, authority figures, religion etc.
It is important to note that asking insightful, precise questions is a critical part of critical thinking (pun intended). Asking questions is essentially the same as posing problems. In traditional learning, the teacher assigns problems to the students and as a result, teachers have already done a great deal of the thinking that the students ought to have done, if they were learning critically. A major part of learning how to think critically is learning to ask the questions—to pose the problems—yourself. This is often the hardest part of critical thinking. Insightful questions generally tend to be open-ended, meaning that there could be more than one right answer. However, one should note that there will be many wrong answers as well. Open-ended questions foster student-centered discussion, thereby encouraging critical thinking.
Learning to think critically makes one comfortable with ambiguity, which is important because ambiguity is the hallmark of the most important real world problems. Through critical thinking one develops the ability to solve unstructured problems. Traditional education has been accused of spending far too much time on solving well-structured problems, which tends to lead to a rather unhealthy emphasis on memorization, which tends to produce graduates that have little tolerance for ambiguity or unstructured problem solving, thereby rendering them unfit to tackle complex problems.
One may ask if all the trouble is worth it. The answer is yes. A high intellectual standard of critical thinking is essential to participate meaningfully in the social, economic and political aspects of a society. Embracing or adapting to continuous social, cultural and technological change also requires critical thinking. People’s life quality and everything they create, produce and build, depends on the quality of their thinking. In other words, the ability to think critically is an important life skill. Everybody encounters from time to time perplexities about what to believe or what to do, both in everyday life and in specialized occupations. Skillful critical thinking is by definition more likely to lead to a satisfactory resolution of such perplexities than inadequate reflection or a knee-jerk reaction. A disposition to respond to perplexities with skillful critical thinking is thus helpful to anyone in managing their life. Furthermore, although most people develop some disposition to think critically and some skill at doing so in the ordinary course of their maturation, especially in the context of schooling, focused attention on the knowledge, skills and attitudes of a critical thinker can improve them noticeably. I should also point out that it is what employers consciously or unconsciously look for when they seek to employ university graduates even though what they might have studied has nothing to do with the work they will be employed to do (of course there are some who require university graduates simply because everybody else does). Finally, the primary purpose of education ought to be to learn how to think and not just the mere accumulation of facts.
To inculcate critical thinking into our universities, the lecture format will have to be modified to accommodate what is known as active learning. While the lecture method is teacher-centered, active learning is student-centered, with the student playing a significantly more active role in class activity. The student is less treated as a person to be taught and more as an equal to the teacher and engages in constructive dialogue both with the teacher and fellow students. Even in a large class, I can imagine a lecturer setting aside a few minutes to allow at least two students debate a well-chosen open-ended question. I am sure this will cause students to show a great deal more interest in their classes, even the back-benchers if only for the sole reason of having a good laugh while listening to their fellow back-benchers talk rubbish. But students should be beware, active learning calls for a great deal more responsibility on their part. They will have to take the trouble to be conversant with the material before it is taught in class. I admit making such a change is not without challenges, for both teacher and student. Lecturers come under intense pressure to cover the assigned curriculum, having to do this while teaching a large class almost necessitates the use of the lecture method, the unfortunate price of this being the genuine lack of student engagement with the course material. Only the minimum necessary will be done to pass what would often be a poorly thought out exam that often does more to end thought than stimulate it.
As an example of life’s unfairness, a lecturer who decided to take on the challenge of teaching her students to think critically might do her job too well, causing her problems come assessment time if she works in an institution that uses conventional methods of student assessment (i.e. a major exam at the end of the semester). To explain what I mean, I will tell a story of what happened during the development of the animated movie hit, Finding Nemo by Pixar animation studios.
Finding Nemo, you would recall, for those of you who watched it was a movie about a fish on a rescue mission to save his kidnapped son. In this he is aided by another fish that suffers from amnesia. Now since this was an animated movie, realism isn’t a high priority (Tom and Jerry amply demonstrates this). The animators were however determined to build as much realism into the movie as possible. To help with this, they hired a PhD student from a local university to give them lectures on fish biology. The lecturer claimed that those were by far the most fulfilling lectures he gave in his life. The irony was that never once was he able to complete a lecture according to his lesson plan. Each time, just a few minutes into his lecture, the questions would start flying from all directions.
Now as far as the ultimate purpose of education is concerned, one couldn’t ask for a better outcome. However, if the animators had been students at a regular university, setting an exam would provide serious challenges to the lecturer. His lesson plans would most likely have been designed to cover the curriculum. The ultimately haphazard nature of the classes would almost certainly mean that there would be parts that didn’t get covered. This presents a challenge when setting exams. If he drops the parts that weren’t covered, he runs the risk of looking incompetent to any examinations board that might be reviewing his exam questions. If he includes them, he runs the risk that students might do poorly on the exam, despite their evident enthusiasm for the subject, and as such, he runs the risk of being queried as to why he would assess what he didn’t teach. This should make clear that trying to inculcate critical thinking in a conventional university requires a very fine balance that is difficult in practice to achieve.
This pressure to cover the curriculum leads to what I consider another big scandal of education – the general horribleness of textbooks. Textbooks are primarily written for the convenience of the teacher as opposed to the inspiration of the student. They written in such a way that it makes easy for teachers to dish out readings and problem sets or create lecture notes that make it easy for the lecturer to demonstrate breadth of coverage come evaluation time. Students bear the brunt of this by having to deal with textbooks that often appear sterile, and are very boring. Small wonder students ditch them at the first opportunity.
Still on the issue of lecturer evaluation, it also doesn’t help that academics are primarily evaluated for promotion on the basis of their research output as opposed to their teaching skills. Hence, they generally do not give the best of themselves in class, they reserve that for their papers.
To be fair to the lecturers, they are not the only ones with misaligned incentives. There are students who would not like a more active mode of learning. They would prefer the passive mode that obtains because it would leave them with a lighter load and more time for extracurriculars. Then there are others who are simply interested in getting good grades, in order to land a well-paying job, irrespective of whether they actually get a solid education or not.
It should be clear now that changing the mode of instruction to accommodate critical thinking will be a herculean task. Even if one lecturer genuinely wanted incorporate active learning into her classes, she is not incentivized to do this by the university system. Such a change would have to happen on a university wide basis, throughout the entire curriculum. An added challenge is that there is bound to be on the part of the lecturers, a lack of familiarity with the critical thinking approach to education. It will take some time for them to effectively learn it.
A lot of research has gone into how best one could go about developing critical thinking skills in university students. That research has led to the identification of two basic models. The first model involves stand-alone instruction. Here, there is an explicit and overt focus on the form of good thinking and reasoning and on the art of asking insightful questions which are now reinforced by examples from everyday life. The other model involves infusion. Here, traditional subjects are structured in such a way that they encourage the development of critical thinking skills and facilitate the asking of open-ended questions. The subjects will often have a multi-disciplinary character in which historical and philosophical approaches loom large.
The infusion model has actually been the basis of a very old form of higher education, actually the oldest form of higher education that mostly has explicit expression these days in the US higher education system. I actually think that its virtual non-existence in the African higher education system is a gap that needs filling. This form of higher education is known as the liberal arts tradition and I shall be discussing in my final post on higher education.
BEFORE YOU GO: Please share this with as many people as possible. Also check out my book, Why Africa is not rich like America and Europe.
Bibliography
- Huber, Richard M. 1992 How Professors Play the Cat Guarding the Cream: Why We’re Paying More and Getting Less in Higher Education. Virginia: George Mason University Press
- Duron Robert et al ‘Critical Thinking Framework for Any Discipline’ International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 2006, Volume 17, Number 2, 160-166
- Hitchcock, David ‘Critical thinking as an educational ideal’ ResearchGate
- Olga Lucía et al ‘Critical Thinking and its Importance in Education: Some Reflections’ https://doi.org/10.16925/ra.v19i34.2144
- Price, David A. 2009 The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company New York: Vintage Books
