“Think about what we do,” wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt in The culture crisis. Hopefully these wise words will soon serve as a guide for students. This is certainly one of the promises of this new course in culture and citizenship. The component that concerns critical thinking should particularly appeal to us.
Take the case of the pandemic. It has come to exacerbate certain phenomena. We are literally bombarded with existential, fundamental questions about freedom, rights, divisions, the power of governments, not to mention the extreme opinions that are conveyed, many on social networks. So much so that public figures leave this social vessel which is taking on water. Given all this, how can we arm the students, how can we help them build a critical rampart which, without being absolutely waterproof, would make it possible to hold back an often insistent swell? Like the gigantic sea wall off New Orleans. Of course, a storm might be strong enough for water to pass over it. But the effort will have been made to stop it before it reaches the shore.
After much thought, I came to the conclusion that there was a need to educate people much more about the importance of critical thinking. You will say: ask even more of the education system? ! What I answer: yes and no. Before training “knowers”, we train individuals. Every teacher should be able to incorporate critical thinking concepts into their lessons without reviewing their entire program. I was rather influenced by a text by Professor Jacques Boisvert published in 2015. It summarizes the main lines of what critical thinking is. It allows a close, prolonged, precise examination of a belief, of any question, by relying on arguments which come to support it and then reach a conclusion. We want to try to get out of a state of doubt, uncertainty. We therefore avoid concluding too quickly, without a certain solid basis. Quite the opposite of what happens on social networks. Intellectual rigor is essential, the comfort of ideology, to be avoided.
To insist on such a thought is to be open to problematic situations and to tolerate ambiguity. It is to be open to opposing arguments, to self-criticism, by appealing to our reason, to our judgment. In the current pandemic context, it is true, emotion is everywhere. We must be wary of it. In some situations, too much emotion may distract us from the validity and value of a particular question.
This fall I am trying the critical thinking experiment with the students in front of me. First by explaining to them its importance, what it is, how it can be useful, and then put it to the test with concrete cases. From the Hyundai and Guillaume Lemay-Thivierge case to the declarations saying that our freedom is cut off by all these health measures.
I do not know the proportion of teachers capable of embarking on such an approach. But everything can be learned, if this question becomes important for you. Developing critical thinking is demanding and takes time. But at least you have to start first. It is a way of confronting everything that falls on us, the news being rich in troubled questions. A spirit without a bulwark will be easily filled. We are all vulnerable, especially students. Thought is like a muscle that must not wither away.
Thinking is dangerous. But not thinking is even more so, says Hannah Arendt.