There are many courses within higher education (HE) which claim to turn students into “critical thinkers”.  The focus is on skills and techniques students can learn, adopt, or adapt such that they “become” a critical thinker, as if such a designation (or identification) was a personal possession and/or that the individual student’s transformation, chrysalis and butterfly like, could be “embodied” – the action of perpetual “critical critic” (Marx – marginal notes to The German Ideology) being captured by the learner.

What such an approach to ‘critical thinking’ forgets is the extent to which criticism is a social act (and event), and not a personal outcome.  Hence, if primacy for the ability to criticise is given to the pertaining social conditions (including individual actions interacting, not simply ‘determinist’ structures) to what extent will any adopter (learner) of critical abilities and skills lose these capacities with changes in their social surroundings, such as ‘leaving university’?

Take a student coming to university from a culture, family, or society ‘A’, where criticism is frowned upon and suppressed (internally as much as externally to the individual).  Upon arrival at university in culture / society ‘B’, they find themselves in a social setting where criticism is encouraged and allowed to flourish.  The student learns techniques and skills of interpretation, contrast, hermeneutics, statistical analysis, or research which enables them to emulate the activities associated with being a “critical thinker”.  By the end of their time at university they have ‘become’ a critical thinker, or at least it seems that way.

But then the student moves back to culture / society ‘B’ (or family context) or onwards to culture ‘C’ (the waged hierarchical workplace) where criticism is limited, disallowed, and even protected against (in some settings) by using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).  Soon enough the skills of ‘critical thinking’ may be abandoned or left behind!  The ‘learner’ unlearns what they were able to use in the ‘freer’ culture and may no longer ‘be’ or remain a critical thinker.

Is it arrogant of further and higher education institutions and their teachers to ‘think’ that they can turn students into perpetual motion ‘critical thinkers’ based on the mediation / transference of not just ‘critical’ techniques, skills, and abilities (on a ‘banking model’ basis – Freire, 1970) but upon temporary experience of a rather unusual or atypical environment?

Or, to what extent can individual (knowledge-embodied) students carry over and inculcate the practices of the university (as a temporal suppression of commercial ‘pressure’) into wider society and/or their culture ‘A’?  Certainly, the ‘belief’ system of so-called Western liberalism, focused on the individual learner as scholastic commodity, has held dearly to the latter conception as a core method of colonisation (distribution of the ‘learned’) for more than 200 years.

Considering these questions, perhaps it is not the educator who imparts ‘critical thinking’ as a technique, but the forms of social relation the individual ‘learner’ moves between and negotiates which either promotes or denies critical thinking’s very possibility.  Educators need to keep this in mind and, as bell hooks might remind us, reflect on how their actions are changing the social world (or not) rather than how their lesson is changing their ‘students’.

References:

Freire, P. (1970) The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. [Penguin Classics]. London: Penguin Books.