Countering cant

Michael Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak takes on the "critical thinking" cant that is rampant in the academy and elsewhere:

"Critical thinking" appears to have all the qualities of a piece of cant. I'm not sure we do teach our students to think critically, and furthermore, I'm not so sure that we think criticallly, and I'm not even sure that if we did, it would make the slightest bit of difference.

Furthermore, saying that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than about teaching your subject matter is an example of pre-emptive rhetorical surrender and is the kind of thing that the humanities have been doing, to their great detriment, throughout my lifetime. If you are only concerned that your subject teaches "critical thinking," then there's really no reason for your subject to exist--if another subject came along that taught "critical thinking" just as well or better than yours, then why keep, say, a medievalist around when you can replace that person?

I think this is exactly why so many important, traditional disciplines have hemmorhaged students, tenure-lines and respect for the past thirty years. Because if you can get "critical thinking" from just about any subject (and believe me, every subject claims to teach "critical thinking"), then what's the payoff for studying a difficult subject like medieval literature? Trying to make the argument that difficult subjects teach more critical thinking is fighting on unfavorable ground: how can you be sure? You, in medieval lit, have to spend hours of class time on history, languages, paleography, theology, metrics, etc. In this other class, which doesn't have all that stuff, we can "think critically" just about the entire time.

I encountered lots of "critical thinking" devotees when I was teaching high school. Advocating critical thinking was a convenient way of agitating against having to teach The Scarlet Letter while still being able to claim the moral and pedagogical high ground.

"Critical thinking" cant has trickled down to pre-school educational theory, too. I remember reading a book about educating young children that suggested it didn't matter whether you had your kids memorize "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" or the Periodic Table of Elements. Either way, they were learning "memorization skills." Let's see ... Ally Sheedy or Percy Shelley? Jewel or John Donne? As Michael Drout points out, an educational establishment that tacitly assumes those poets (or "poets," as the case may be) confer equal "critical thinking" advantages is doing very little critical thinking indeed:

So if you, like me, say or have said that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than the actual subject material, you, like me, are guilty of transmitting cant. And the transmission of cant shows that you're not practicing "critical thinking."

This book -- given its critique of the "skills" nonsense that many teachers and educational theorists have fallen prey to -- was bound, at the time of its publication, to engender hysterical denunciations among some entrenched Ed school types, but I'm often surprised by the way it continues to be dismissed by otherwise sensible people, some of whom have perhaps never even read it. I suppose in the skills-oriented world in which we live, you don't have to read a book to be able to critique it. Just pull out your handy-dandy bag of "critical thinking" tricks.

UPDATE: I am so embarrassed. I have this post up here forever and no one bothers to point out to me that I misspelled the title of Hawthorne's great novel to make it look as if it had something to do with the heroine of Gone with the Wind? Did you all think I didn't know the difference? And if we were having a conversation and I had a big piece of spinach plastered to my front tooth, would you choose to let me gab away while you tried not to fix your gaze on the hideous green tooth-vine? I feel like Katharine Hepburn in that scene in Bringing Up Baby, where Cary Grant accidentally steps on the train of Hepburn's evening gown and rips the whole back of her dress off, but instead of having Cary Grant walk closely and gallantly behind me while I make my way out of the restaurant (and make a charming fool of himself in the process), I have you all merely stand back and wave and watch me go.