Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Ask a professor the purpose of college and you are likely to get in response, “to learn how to think” or, more specifically, “to learn critical thinking.” Indeed, this was what I was told at my undergrad orientation. All of use eager students were herded into a room to learn about the wonderful programs, facilities, and opportunities at the university. But, as fun as all that other stuff may be, the main purpose of everything was to teach us to think critically.

So what is critical thinking? How is it done? I was never required to take a class in critical thinking in college, nor as part of my transfer prerequisites at the community college I attended. Unlike the scientific method or legal analysis, there seems to be no commonly accepted method of critical analysis. How can that be given that virtually any major university’s mission statement includes the teaching of critical thinking as a major, if not the major, goal?

But while I may not have learned any formal method, I surely learned one informally. The purpose of critical thinking was to uncover biases, assumptions, and flaws in the work being studied. Ah! Well, OK, I’m good at that — we’re all pretty good at that here, right? So even if we didn’t learn a formal method of critical analysis (perhaps because one doesn’t really exist), that’s not to say the university didn’t fulfill its mission.

But is critical thinking enough? Seth Roberts says no. He likens a university teaching only critical thinking to a flight school that teaches only take-offs but not landings. Critical thinking by itself is woefully insufficient, it is ignoring what is valuable and promising in a rush to point out what is imperfect. He writes:

The overemphasis — the total emphasis — on critical thinking has big and harmful consequences on graduate students. At Berkeley, in a weekly seminar called Animal Behavior Lunch, we would discuss a recent animal behavior paper. The dozen-odd graduate students could only find fault. Out of hundreds and hundreds of comments, I cannot remember a single positive one from a graduate student. Sometimes a faculty member would intervene: “Let’s not be too negative…” But week after week it kept happening. Relentless negativity caused trouble for the graduate students because every plan of their own that they thought of, they placed too much emphasis on what was wrong with it. Trying to overcome the problems, their research became too big and complicated. For example, they ran control groups before obtaining the basic effect. They had been very poorly taught — by all those professors who taught critical thinking.

Roberts advocates what he calls “appreciative thinking.” I know, I know — sounds Pollyannaish, right? He explains:

To learn appreciative thinking is to learn to appreciate, to learn to see the value of things. More or less the opposite of critical thinking. That I had to make up a phrase shows the problem. I have complained many times about an overemphasis on critical thinking at universities. Sometimes I’d say, “Have you ever heard the term appreciative thinking? No? How many times have you heard the term critical thinking?” When it comes to scientific papers, to teach appreciative thinking means to help students see such aspects of a paper as: 1. What can we learn from it? What new ideas does it suggest? What already-existing plausible ideas does it make more plausible or less plausible?

2. How is it an improvement over previous work? Does it use new methods? Does it use old methods in a new way? Do it show a better way to do something?

3. Did the authors show good taste in their choice of problem? Is this a problem both important and possibly solvable?

4. Are details done well? Is it well-written? Is the context of the work made clear? Are the data well-analyzed? Does it make good use of graphs? Is the discussion imaginative rather than formulaic?

5. What’s interesting or enjoyable about it?

I don’t know about you, but to me all of those questions sound just as valid, interesting, and intellectually stimulating as those asked during a critical analysis. Isn’t probing for what’s right about a given work just as important as probing for what’s wrong? If so, why isn’t it taught more?

A few other points:

Perhaps the over-emphasis/exclusive emphasis on critical thinking is attributable, at least in part, to human nature. Don’t we find it much easier to tear down than to build up? Doesn’t writing a pan of a movie come much easier than writing a positive one? Maybe it’s just a function of semantic confusion. As a commenter points out in one of the above posts, “to criticize” has two meanings: to examine closely and to find fault. As another commenter points out, it may be a function of professorial status-seeking. A professor does not usually make a name for himself praising the work of others. No, you command attention by ruthlessly pointing out flaws. Because this mode of inquiry is necessary for professors to acquire their jobs, it’s the only way they know how to do business. They’re simply not equipped to teach any other method.