The Vanishing Art: Why Critical Thinking is Crucial in a Material World

Critical thinking: the skill that shapes the future.

The art of learning isn’t just about memorizing facts; it’s fundamentally about being able to think critically. This methodical approach to analysis and evaluation is the foundation of true comprehension.

As an advocate for critical thinking in both my personal and professional life, I have observed its essential role in fostering progressive and informed societies. However, I’ve also witnessed how this kind of thinking is often not welcome, especially in developing regions like South Asia or Africa, where established norms and systems resist rigorous scrutiny. Even in the modern, developed world, this art appears to be vanishing day by day. The very foundation of this intellectual tradition, established by the great philosopher Plato — the student of Socrates and founder of the inaugural institution for critical thinking, “The Academy” — is being undermined.

This neglect is very clear in the workplace. The corporate culture rarely encourages critical thinking. Instead, it focuses on making money quickly, often without considering the ethical or long-term effects of how that money is made. This never-ending quest for material gain has gotten in the way of people’s intellectual growth and society’s essential need for progress.

What is So Critical About “Critical Thinking?”

This is the core question we must address. What makes “Critical Thinking” so important? The main reason for picking such a controversial topic is the alarming fact that critical thinking — an important part of a good education — is becoming obsolete. Education has increasingly prioritized strategic or economic objectives over the past few years, marginalizing the essential framework of critical thinking.

This erosion raises profound questions:

• Should education only prepare students for a good job that will give them financial security and a good quality of life?

• Or can education serve a more philosophical function, aiding students in comprehending the significance of their existence and their societal role?

Critical thinking helps students open their minds so they can see, think about, and notice small but important things that are often overlooked in the race for corporate supremacy. It helps them figure out things like: What are the real reasons to get an education? What good can they do for society? Is education genuinely changing societies, or is it just getting people ready to be ambitious parts of the corporate machine?

The foremost challenge today is to ascertain how education can reintegrate the quality of critical thinking, considering that the contemporary system is predominantly ineffective in cultivating critical thinkers on a broad scale.

Unpacking the Core: Defining Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the process of judging the truthfulness, value, and accuracy of information in order to make good claims or arguments. It’s not just a skill; it’s a deeply ingrained intellectual habit.

Critical thinking is a disciplined process where an individual examines statements, research, or claims to determine their validity through factual assessment.

The American Philosophical Association has pinpointed six essential skills that define an individual’s capacity for critical thinking:

• The Ability to Interpret: This means putting information into groups and making its main point clear.

• Analytical Skills: Judging ideas and arguments carefully and coming to a conclusion based on clear reasoning.

• The Ability to Evaluate: Figuring out how much trust you can put in an argument or claim, which means finding the flaws in a position.

• Inference: Figuring out how strong or weak conclusions are by finding hidden assumptions and coming up with other possible explanations.

• To Apply an Explanation: Using the right evidence and method to back up your reasoning.

• Self-Regulation: Being aware of how you think, including your own biases, and being able to fix them when you need to.

These skills are combined with disposition, which is the ability to listen to arguments with an open and clear mind and a healthy dose of skepticism to figure out how factually true they are.

A good critical thinker cultivates habits like being: curious, open-minded, well-informed, fair-minded when judging, wise when making decisions, honest about their own biases, specific when looking for information, willing to change their mind, focused when asking questions, and determined when looking for answers.

The Neoliberal Shadow: Reshaping Education

It takes a lot of work and planning to teach kids how to think critically and to make it a natural habit. But a big problem has come up: the neoliberal ideology. This framework is changing how students think, pushing them toward narrow, strategic goals, which is a major worry for preserving their ability to think critically.

This ideology has had especially clear effects on education:

• Educator Struggle: Educators are fighting for better policies and big changes because they have been ignored and paid unfairly for years.

• Systemic Division: Neoliberal policies, often meant to improve schools, have instead made the school system more divided and tiered. In the US, this often meant the expulsion of Black or Brown teachers and the closure of the schools where they worked.

• Devaluing the Profession: Despite the construction of new schools, designs often pay teachers less for their work and make employment weakening rates higher, leading to fewer people wanting to pursue teaching as a career.

This widespread way of thinking can be analyzed through two models from educational psychology: The Whole Child and Higher Order Thinking (HOT).

The Whole Child: A Democratic Ideal Co-opted

The need to teach to the whole child comes from the fact that students are often only judged by their cognitive ability, which ignores important emotional, social, moral, and character skills necessary for good citizenship.

However, endorsing this concept may unintentionally expose educators to the endorsement of neoliberal ideology. For example, the idea of “grit” (persistence in hard goals) is presented as a non-cognitive skill that can help close the achievement gap. Critics, on the other hand, argue that grit is used to support the idea that society is based on merit and individualism, which ignores systemic problems and requires people to conform to certain curricula.

Higher Order Thinking: Economic Utility Above Democracy

Higher-Order Thinking (HOT) includes self-regulated learning, critical thinking, creativity, metacognition, and problem-solving. While historically grounded in cultivating democratic citizenship, the recent dedication to promoting HOT is primarily driven by concepts regarding the types of individuals required for the unpredictable, competitive, and information-rich economy of the 21st century.

It’s easy to see the logic: a good student or worker is a good thinker. Neoliberal ideology is driving the formal instruction and evaluation of these skills, not for democratic ends, but to render citizens adaptable and beneficial to the economy.

The critical thinking instruction frequently entails contemplating issues in accordance with curricular objectives related to students’ self-interested dynamics (e.g., human capital, credentials, and grades). This is very different from what theorists like Paulo Freire said about critical consciousness. He saw critical thinking as the act of examining and committing to change systems of oppression and work to make democratic processes better.

STEM Education: A Limited Perspective

STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) is getting a lot of attention around the world, often supported by the media. But there is still an important question that has not been answered: how much is it really helping K-12 students learn how to think critically?

While STEM helps students learn how to manage their money and set and reach personal goals, it’s still unclear how well it helps them develop strong critical thinking skills. STEM is a well-known and popular term, but it doesn’t always include a curriculum and goals that prioritize the natural and analytical aspects of critical thinking.

A Call to Re-Engage with Wisdom

Critical thinking is a natural and general process that helps students look at, judge, and confidently come to a conclusion about any important claim or argument. But the current system of education isn’t helping with this. The emphasis on STEM education and the objective of cultivating skills to navigate career trajectories and financial obstacles have become paramount.

More and more, schools are acting like businesses and teaching kids how to run a business and be a manager instead of how to think critically and explore new ideas.

People who think critically can look at a lot of things that they don’t know or that they haven’t answered yet, using different points of view to get a complete picture. To move forward as a society, the educational system needs to include more analytical and philosophical courses in the curriculum so that students can learn how to really think critically.

We must learn from “The Academy” and make sure that the search for knowledge stays a noble and important goal, not just a way to make money. Will we let the ability to think deeply and independently go away, or will we reclaim the wisdom of critical engagement for a better, more thoughtful future?