[Xmca-l] Re: CHAT and Critical Thinking -request for suggestions

[Robert Lake]

Hi Natalia,
Here is a piece I appreciate on  the distinctions between Critical Thinking
and Critical Pedagogy.
*Robert Lake*

Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy:
Relations, Differences, and Limits

Nicholas C. Burbules and Rupert Berk
Department of Educational Policy Studies


Published in Critical Theories in Education, Thomas S. Popkewitz and Lynn
Fendler, eds. (NY: Routledge, 1999).

Two literatures have shaped much of the writing in the educational
foundations over the past two decades: Critical Thinking and Critical
Pedagogy. Each has its textual reference points, its favored authors, and
its desired audiences. Each invokes the term "critical" as a valued
educational goal: urging teachers to help students become more skeptical
toward commonly accepted truisms. Each says, in its own way, "Do not let
yourself be deceived." And each has sought to reach and influence
particular groups of educators, at all levels of schooling, through
workshops, lectures, and pedagogical texts. They share a passion and sense
of urgency about the need for more critically oriented classrooms. Yet with
very few exceptions these literatures do not discuss one another. Is this
because they propose conflicting visions of what "critical" thought
entails? Are their approaches to pedagogy incompatible? Might there be
moments of insight that each can offer the other? Do they perhaps share
common limitations, which through comparison become more apparent? Are
there other ways to think about becoming "critical" that stand outside
these traditions, but which hold educational significance? These are the
questions motivating this essay.

We will begin by contrasting Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy in
terms of their conception of what it means to be "critical." We will
suggest some important similarities, and differences, in how they frame
this topic. Each tradition has to some extent criticized the other; and
each has been criticized, sometimes along similar lines, by other
perspectives, especially feminist and poststructural perspectives. These
lines of reciprocal and external criticism, in turn, lead us to suggest
some different ways to think about "criticality."

At a broad level, Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy share some common
concerns. They both imagine a general population in society who are to some
extent deficient in the abilities or dispositions that would allow them to
discern certain kinds of inaccuracies, distortions, and even falsehoods.
They share a concern with how these inaccuracies, distortions, and
falsehoods limit freedom, though this concern is more explicit in the
Critical Pedagogy tradition, which sees society as fundamentally divided by
relations of unequal power. Critical Pedagogues are specifically concerned
with the influences of educational knowledge, and of cultural formations
generally, that perpetuate or legitimate an unjust status quo; fostering a
critical capacity in citizens is a way of enabling them to resist such
power effects. Critical Pedagogues take sides, on behalf of those groups
who are disenfranchised from social, economic, and political possibilities.
Many Critical Thinking authors would cite similar concerns, but regard them
as subsidiary to the more inclusive problem of people basing their life
choices on unsubstantiated truth claims — a problem that is nonpartisan in
its nature or effects. For Critical Thinking advocates, all of us need to
be better critical thinkers, and there is often an implicit hope that
enhanced critical thinking could have a *general* humanizing effect, across
all social groups and classes. In this sense, both Critical Thinking and
Critical Pedagogy authors would argue that by helping to make people more
critical in thought and action, progressively minded educators can help to
free learners to see the world as it is and to act accordingly; critical
education can increase freedom and enlarge the scope of human possibilities.

Yet, as one zooms in, further differences appear. The Critical Thinking
tradition concerns itself primarily with criteria of epistemic adequacy: to
be "critical" basically means to be more discerning in recognizing faulty
arguments, hasty generalizations, assertions lacking evidence, truth claims
based on unreliable authority, ambiguous or obscure concepts, and so forth.
For the Critical Thinker, people do not sufficiently analyze the reasons by
which they live, do not examine the assumptions, commitments, and logic of
daily life. As Richard Paul puts it, the basic problem is irrational,
illogical, and unexamined living. He believes that people need to learn how
to express and criticize the logic of arguments that underpin our everyday
activity: "The art of explicating, analyzing, and assessing these
‘arguments’ and ‘logic’ is essential to leading an examined life" (Paul
1990, 66). The prime tools of Critical Thinking are the skills of formal
and informal logic, conceptual analysis, and epistemology. The primary
preoccupation of Critical Thinking is to supplant sloppy or distorted
thinking with thinking based upon reliable procedures of inquiry. Where our
beliefs remain unexamined, we are not free; we act without thinking about
why we act, and thus do not exercise control over our own destinies. For
the Critical Thinking tradition, as Harvey Siegel states, critical thinking
aims at self-sufficiency, and "a self-sufficient person is a liberated
person...free from the unwarranted and undesirable control of unjustified
beliefs" (Siegel, 1988, 58).

The Critical Pedagogy tradition begins from a very different starting
point. It regards specific belief claims, not primarily as propositions to
be assessed for their truth content, but as parts of systems of belief and
action that have aggregate effects within the power structures of society.
It asks first about these systems of belief and action, *who benefits*? The
primary preoccupation of Critical Pedagogy is with social injustice and how
to transform inequitable, undemocratic, or oppressive institutions and
social relations. At some point, assessments of truth or conceptual
slipperiness might come into the discussion (different writers in the
Critical Pedagogy tradition differ in this respect), but they are in the
service of demonstrating how certain power effects occur, not in the
service of pursuing Truth in some dispassioned sense (Burbules 1992/1995).
Indeed, a crucial dimension of this approach is that certain claims, even
if they might be "true" or substantiated within particular confines and
assumptions, might nevertheless be partisan in their effects. Assertions
that African-Americans score lower on IQ tests, for example, even if it is
a "fact" that this particular population does on average score lower on
this particular set of tests, leaves significant larger questions
unaddressed, not the least of which is what effect such assertions have on
a general population that is not aware of the important limits of these
tests or the tenuous relation, at best, between "what IQ tests measure" and
"intelligence." Other important questions, from this standpoint, include:
Who is making these assertions? Why are they being made at this point in
time? Who funds such research? Who promulgates these "findings"? Are they
being raised to question African-American intelligence or to demonstrate
the bias of IQ tests? Such questions, from the Critical Pedagogy
perspective, are not external to, or separable from, the import of also
weighing the evidentiary base for such claims.

Now, the Critical Thinking response to this approach will be that these are
simply two different, perhaps both valuable, endeavors. It is one thing to
question the evidentiary base (or logic, or clarity, or coherence) of a
particular claim, and to find it wanting. This is one kind of critique,
adequate and worthwhile on its own terms. It is something else, something
separate, to question the motivation behind those who propound certain
views, their group interests, the effects of their claims on society, and
so forth. That sort of critique might also be worthwhile (we suspect that
most Critical Thinking authors would say that it *is* worthwhile), but it
depends on a different sort of analysis, with a different burden of
argument — one that philosophers may have less to contribute to than would
historians or sociologists, for example.

The response, in turn, from the Critical Pedagogy point of view is that the
two levels cannot be kept separate because the standards of epistemic
adequacy themselves (valid argument, supporting evidence, conceptual
clarity, and so on) *and the particular ways in which these standards are
invoked and interpreted in particular settings* inevitably involve the very
same considerations of who, where, when, and why that any other social
belief claims raise. Moreover, such considerations inevitably blur into and
influence epistemic matters in a narrower sense, such as how research
questions are defined, the methods of such research, and the qualifications
of the researchers and writers who produce such writings for public
attention.

But neither the Critical Thinking nor the Critical Pedagogy tradition is
monolithic or homogeneous, and a closer examination of each reveals further
dimensions of these similarities and differences.

Critical Thinking

A concern with critical thinking in education, in the broad sense of
teaching students the rules of logic or how to assess evidence, is hardly
new: it is woven throughout the Western tradition of education, from the
Greeks to the Scholastics to the present day. Separate segments of the
curriculum have often been dedicated to such studies, especially at higher
levels of schooling. What the Critical Thinking movement has emphasized is
the idea that specific reasoning skills undergird the curriculum as a
whole; that the purpose of education generally is to foster critical
thinking; and that the skills and dispositions of critical thinking can and
should infuse teaching and learning at all levels of schooling. Critical
thinking is linked to the idea of rationality itself, and developing
rationality is seen as a prime, if not *the *prime, aim of education (see,
for example, Siegel 1988).

The names most frequently associated with this tradition, at least in the
United States, include Robert Ennis, John McPeck, Richard Paul, Israel
Scheffler, and Harvey Siegel. While a detailed survey of their respective
views, and the significant differences among their outlooks, is outside our
scope here, a few key themes and debates have emerged in recent years
within this field of inquiry.

To Critical Thinking, the critical person is something like a critical
consumer of information; he or she is driven to seek reasons and evidence.
Part of this is a matter of mastering certain skills of thought: learning
to diagnose invalid forms of argument, knowing how to make and defend
distinctions, and so on. Much of the literature in this area, especially
early on, seemed to be devoted to lists and taxonomies of what a "critical
thinker" should know and be able to do (Ennis 1962, 1980). More recently,
however, various authors in this tradition have come to recognize that
teaching content and skills is of minor import if learners do not also
develop the dispositions or inclination to look at the world through a
critical lens. By this, Critical Thinking means that the critical person
has not only the capacity (the skills) to seek reasons, truth, and
evidence, but also that he or she has the drive (disposition) to seek them.
For instance, Ennis claims that a critical person not only should seek
reasons and try to be well informed, but that he or she should have a
tendency to do such things (Ennis 1987, 1996). Siegel criticizes Ennis
somewhat for seeing dispositions simply as what animates the skills of
critical thinking, because this fails to distinguish sufficiently the
critical thinker from critical thinking. For Siegel, a cluster of
dispositions (the "critical spirit") is more like a deep-seated character
trait, something like Scheffler’s notion of "a love of truth and a contempt
of lying" (Siegel 1988; Scheffler 1991). It is part of critical thinking
itself. Paul also stresses this distinction between skills and dispositions
in his distinction between "weak-sense" and "strong-sense" critical
thinking. For Paul, the "weak-sense" means that one has learned the skills
and can demonstrate them when asked to do so; the "strong-sense" means that
one has incorporated these skills into a way of living in which one’s own
assumptions are re-examined and questioned as well. According to Paul, a
critical thinker in the "strong sense" has a passionate drive for "clarity,
accuracy, and fairmindedness" (Paul 1983, 23; see also Paul 1994).

This dispositional view of critical thinking has real advantages over the
skills-only view. But in important respects it is still limited. First, it
is not clear exactly what is entailed by making such dispositions
*part of *critical
thinking. In our view it not only broadens the notion of criticality beyond
mere "logicality," but it necessarily requires a greater attention to
institutional contexts and social relations than Critical Thinking authors
have provided. Both the skills-based view and the skills-plus-dispositions
view are still focused on the individual person. But it is only in the
context of social relations that these dispositions or character traits can
be formed or expressed, and for this reason the practices of critical
thinking *inherently *involve bringing about certain social conditions.
Part of what it is to be a critical thinker is to be engaged in certain
kinds of conversations and relations with others; and the kinds of social
circumstances that promote or inhibit that must therefore be part of the
examination of what Critical Thinking is trying to achieve.

A second theme in the Critical Thinking literature has been the extent to
which critical thinking can be characterized as a set of generalized
abilities and dispositions, as opposed to content-specific abilities and
dispositions that are learned and expressed differently in different areas
of investigation. Can a general "Critical Thinking" course develop
abilities and dispositions that will then be applied in any of a range of
fields; or should such material be presented specifically in connection to
the questions and content of particular fields of study? Is a scientist who
is a critical thinker doing the same things as an historian who is a
critical thinker? When each evaluates "good evidence," are they truly
thinking about problems in similar ways, or are the differences in
interpretation and application dominant? This debate has set John McPeck,
the chief advocate of content-specificity, in opposition to a number of
other theorists in this area (Norris 1992; Talaska 1992). This issue
relates not only to the question of how we might teach critical thinking,
but also to how and whether one can test for a general facility in critical
thinking (Ennis 1984).

A third debate has addressed the question of the degree to which the
standards of critical thinking, and the conception of rationality that
underlies them, are culturally biased in favor of a particular masculine
and/or Western mode of thinking, one that implicitly devalues other "ways
of knowing." Theories of education that stress the primary importance of
logic, conceptual clarity, and rigorous adherence to scientific evidence
have been challenged by various advocates of cultural and gender diversity
who emphasize respect for alternative world views and styles of reasoning.
Partly in response to such criticisms, Richard Paul has developed a
conception of critical thinking that regards "sociocentrism" as itself a
sign of flawed thinking (Paul 1994). Paul believes that, because critical
thinking allows us to overcome the sway of our egocentric and sociocentric
beliefs, it is "essential to our role as moral agents and as potential
shapers of our own nature and destiny" (Paul 1990, 67). For Paul, and for
some other Critical Thinking authors as well, part of the method of
critical thinking involves fostering dialogue, in which thinking from the
perspective of others is also relevant to the assessment of truth claims; a
too-hasty imposition of one’s own standards of evidence might result not
only in a premature rejection of credible alternative points of view, but
might also have the effect of silencing the voices of those who (in the
present context) need to be encouraged as much as possible to speak for
themselves. In this respect, we see Paul introducing into the very
definition of critical thinking some of the sorts of social and contextual
factors that Critical Pedagogy writers have emphasized.

Critical Pedagogy

The idea of Critical Pedagogy begins with the neo-Marxian literature on
Critical Theory (Stanley 1992). The early Critical Theorists (most of whom
were associated with the Frankfurt School) believed that Marxism had
underemphasized the importance of cultural and media influences for the
persistence of capitalism; that maintaining conditions of ideological
hegemony were important for (in fact inseparable from) the legitimacy and
smooth working of capitalist economic relations. One obvious example would
be in the growth of advertising as both a spur to rising consumption and as
a means of creating the image of industries driven only by a desire to
serve the needs of their customers. As consumers, as workers, and as
winners or losers in the marketplace of employment, citizens in a
capitalist society need both to know their "rightful" place in the order of
things and to be reconciled to that destiny. Systems of education are among
the institutions that foster and reinforce such beliefs, through the
rhetoric of meritocracy, through testing, through tracking, through
vocational training or college preparatory curricula, and so forth (Bowles
& Gintis 1976; Apple 1979; Popkewitz 1991).

Critical Pedagogy represents, in a phrase, the reaction of progressive
educators against such institutionalized functions. It is an effort to work
within educational institutions and other media to raise questions about
inequalities of power, about the false myths of opportunity and merit for
many students, and about the way belief systems become internalized to the
point where individuals and groups abandon the very aspiration to question
or change their lot in life. Some of the authors mostly strongly associated
with this tradition include Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and
Ira Shor. In the language of Critical Pedagogy, the critical person is one
who is empowered to seek justice, to seek emancipation. Not only is the
critical person adept at recognizing injustice but, for Critical Pedagogy,
that person is also moved to change it. Here Critical Pedagogy
wholeheartedly takes up Marx's Thesis XI on Feuerbach: "The philosophers
have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to
change it" (Marx 1845/1977, 158).

This emphasis on change, and on collective action to achieve it, moves the
central concerns of Critical Pedagogy rather far from those of Critical
Thinking: the endeavor to teach others to think critically is less a matter
of fostering individual skills and dispositions, and more a consequence of
the *pedagogical relations*, between teachers and students and among
students, which promote it; furthermore, the object of thinking critically
is not only against demonstrably false beliefs, but also those that are
misleading, partisan, or implicated in the preservation of an unjust status
quo.

The author who has articulated these concerns most strongly is Paulo
Freire, writing originally within the specific context of promoting adult
literacy within Latin American peasant communities, but whose work has
taken on an increasingly international interest and appeal in the past
three decades (Freire 1970a, 1970b, 1973, 1985; McLaren & Lankshear 1993;
McLaren & Leonard 1993). For Freire, Critical Pedagogy is concerned with
the development of *conscienticizao*, usually translated as "critical
consciousness."Freedom, for Freire, begins with the recognition of a system
of oppressive relations, and one’s own place in that system. The task of
Critical Pedagogy is to bring members of an oppressed group to a critical
consciousness of their situation as a beginning point of their liberatory
*praxis*. Change in consciousness and concrete action are linked for
Freire; the greatest single barrier against the prospect of liberation is
an ingrained, fatalistic belief in the inevitability and necessity of an
unjust status quo.

One important way in which Giroux develops this idea is in his distinction
between a "language of critique" and a "language of possibility" (Giroux
1983, 1988). As he stresses, both are essential to the pursuit of social
justice. Giroux points to what he sees as the failure of the radical
critics of the new sociology of education because, in his view, they
offered a language of critique, but not a language of possibility. They saw
schools primarily as instruments for the reproduction of capitalist
relations and for the legitimation of dominant ideologies, and thus were
unable to construct a discourse for "counterhegemonic" practices in schools
(Giroux 1988, 111-112). Giroux stresses the importance of developing a
language of possibility as part of what makes a person critical. As he puts
it, the aim of the critical educator should be "to raise ambitions,
desires, and real hope for those who wish to take seriously the issue of
educational struggle and social justice" (Giroux 1988, 177).

For both Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy, "criticality" requires
that one be moved to do something, whether that something be seeking
reasons or seeking social justice. For Critical Thinking, it is not enough
to know how to seek reasons, truth, and understanding; one must also be
impassioned to pursue them rigorously. For Critical Pedagogy, that one can
critically reflect and interpret the world is not sufficient; one must also
be willing and able to act to change that world. From the standpoint of
Critical Pedagogy the Critical Thinking tradition assumes an overly direct
connection between reasons and action. For instance, when Ennis conceives
Critical Thinking as "reasonable reflective thinking focused on deciding
what to believe or to do," the assumption is that "deciding" usually leads
relatively unproblematically to the "doing" (Ennis 1987). The model of
practical reasoning on which this view depends assumes a relatively
straightforward relation, in most cases, between the force of reasons and
action. But for Critical Pedagogy the problems of overcoming oppressed
thinking and demoralization are more complex than this: changing thought
and practice must occur together; they fuel one another. For Freire,
criticality requires *praxis* — both reflection and action, both
interpretation and change. As he puts it, "Critical consciousness is
brought about not through intellectual effort alone but through *praxis* —
through the authentic union of action and reflection" (Freire 1970a, 48).

Critical Pedagogy would never find it sufficient to reform the habits of
thought of thinkers, however effectively, without challenging and
transforming the institutions, ideologies, and relations that engender
distorted, oppressed thinking in the first place — not as an additional act
beyond the pedagogical one, but as an inseparable part of it. For Critical
Thinking, at most, the development of more discerning thinkers might make
them *more likely* to undermine discreditable institutions, to challenge
misleading authorities, and so on — but this would be a separate
consequence of the attainment of Critical Thinking, not part of it.

A second central theme in Freire’s work, which has fundamentally shaped the
Critical Pedagogy tradition, is his particular focus on "literacy." At the
ground level, what motivated Freire’s original work was the attempt to
develop an adult literacy program, one in which developing the capacity to
read was tied into developing an enhanced sense of individual and
collective self-esteem and confidence. To be illiterate, for Freire, was
not only to lack the skills of reading and writing; it was to feel
powerless and dependent in a much more general way as well. The challenge
to an adult literacy campaign was not only to provide skills, but to
address directly the self-contempt and sense of powerlessness that he
believed accompanied illiteracy (Freire 1970b). Hence his approach to
fostering literacy combined the development of basic skills in reading and
writing; the development of a sense of confidence and efficacy, especially
in collective thought and action; and the desire to change, not only one’s
self, but the circumstances of one’s social group. The pedagogical method
that he thinks promote all of these is *dialogue*: "cultural action for
freedom is characterized by dialogue, and its preeminent purpose is to
conscientize the people" (Freire 1970a, 47).

Richard Paul says similarly that "dialogical thinking" is inherent to
Critical Thinking (Paul 1990). However, there is more of a social emphasis
to dialogue within Critical Pedagogy: dialogue occurs between people, not
purely as a form of dialogical thought. Here again Critical Pedagogy
focuses more upon institutional settings and relations between individuals,
where Critical Thinking’s focus is more on the individuals themselves. In
other words, dialogue directly involves others, while one person’s
development of "dialogical thinking" may only indirectly involve others.
Yet the work of Vygotsky and others would argue that the development of
such capacities for individuals necessarily involves social interactions as
well. Paul addresses this point, but it does not play the central role in
his theory that it does for Freire and other Critical Pedagogues — still,
Paul appears to us to be somewhat of a transitional figure between these
two traditions.

The method of Critical Pedagogy for Freire involves, to use his phrase,
"reading the world" as well as "reading the word" (Freire & Macedo 1987).
Part of developing a critical consciousness, as noted above, is critiquing
the social relations, social institutions, and social traditions that
create and maintain conditions of oppression. For Freire, the teaching of
literacy is a primary form of cultural action, and as action it must
"relate speaking the word to transforming reality" (Freire 1970a, 4). To do
this, Freire uses what he calls *codifications*: representative images that
both "illustrate" the words or phrases students are learning to read, and
also represent problematic social conditions that become the focus of
collective dialogue (and, eventually, the object of strategies for
potential change). The process of *decodification* is a kind of "reading" —
a "reading" of social dynamics, of forces of reaction or change, of why the
world is as it is, and how it might be made different. Decodification is
the attempt to "read the world" with the same kind of perspicacity with
which one is learning to "read the word."

In this important regard, Critical Pedagogy shares with Critical Thinking
the idea that there is something *real* about which they can raise the
consciousness of people. Both traditions believe that there is something
given, against which mistaken beliefs and distorted perceptions can be
tested. In both, there is a drive to bring people to recognize "the way
things are" (Freire 1970a, 17). In different words, Critical Pedagogy and
Critical Thinking arise from the same sentiment to overcome ignorance, to
test the distorted against the true, to ground effective human action in an
accurate sense of social reality. Of course, how each movement talks about
"the way things are" is quite different. For Critical Thinking, this is
about empirically demonstrable facts. For Critical Pedagogy, on the other
hand, this is about the intersubjective attempt to formulate and agree upon
a common understanding about "structures of oppression" and "relations of
domination." As we have discussed, there is more to this process than
simply determining the "facts"; but, in the end, for Freire as for any
other Marxist tradition, this intersubjective process is thought to be
grounded in a set of objective conditions.

Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy

In the discussion so far, we have tried to emphasize some relations and
contrasts between the Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions.
To the extent that they have addressed one another, the commentary has
often been antagonistic:

The most powerful, yet limited, definition of critical thinking comes out
of the positivist tradition in the applied sciences and suffers from what I
call the Internal Consistency position. According to the adherents of the
Internal Consistency position, critical thinking refers primarily to
teaching students how to analyze and develop reading and writing
assignments from the perspective of formal, logical patterns of
consistency....While all of the learning skills are important, their
limitations as a whole lie in what is excluded, and it is with respect to
what is missing that the ideology of such an approach is revealed (Giroux
1994, 200-201).

Although I hesitate to dignify Henry Giroux’s article on citizenship with a
reply, I find it hard to contain myself. The article shows respect neither
for logic nor for the English language....Giroux’s own bombastic,
jargon-ridden rhetoric...is elitist in the worst sense: it is designed to
erect a barrier between the author and any reader not already a member of
the "critical" cult (Schrag 1988, 143).

There are other, more constructive engagements, however. Certain authors
within each tradition have seriously tried to engage the concerns of the
other — although, interestingly, the purpose of such investigations has
usually been to demonstrate that all of the truly beneficial qualities of
the other tradition can be reconciled with the best of one’s own, without
any of the purported drawbacks:

It should be clear that my aim is not to discredit the ideal of critical
thinking. Rather, I question whether the practices of teaching critical
thinking...as it has evolved into the practice of teaching informal logic
is *sufficient* for actualizing the ideal. I have argued that it is not
sufficient, if "critical thinking" includes the ability to decode the
political nature of events and institutions, and if it includes the ability
to envision alternative events and institutions (Kaplan 1991/1994, 217,
emphasis added).

Postmodernism, or any other perspective which seriously endorses radical or
progressive social and educational change, requires an epistemology which
endorses truth and justification as viable theoretical notions. That is to
say: Postmodern advocacy of radical pedagogies (and politics) requires
Old-Fashioned Epistemology (Siegel 1993, 22).

>From the perspective of Critical Thinking, Critical Pedagogy crosses a
threshold between teaching criticality and indoctrinating. Teaching
students to think critically must include allowing them to come to their
own conclusions; yet Critical Pedagogy seems to come dangerously close to
prejudging what those conclusions must be. Critical Pedagogy see this
threshold problem conversely: indoctrination is the case already; students
must be brought to criticality, and this can only be done by alerting them
to the social conditions that have brought this about. In short, we can
restate the problem as follows: Critical Thinking’s claim is, at heart, to
teach how to think critically, not how to think politically; for Critical
Pedagogy, this is a false distinction.

For Critical Pedagogy, as we have discussed, self-emancipation is
contingent upon social emancipation. It is not only a difference between an
emphasis on the individual and an emphasis on society as a whole; both
Critical Pedagogy and Critical Thinking want "criticality" in both senses
(Missimer 1989/1994; Hostetler 1991/1994). It is rather that, for Critical
Pedagogy, individual criticality is intimately linked to social
criticality, joining, in Giroux’s phrase, "the conditions for social, and
hence, self-emancipation" (Giroux 1988, 110). For Critical Thinking, the
attainment of individual critical thinking may, with success for enough
people, *lead to* an increase in critical thinking socially, but it does
not depend upon it.

These traditions also explicitly differ from one another in the different
problems and contexts they regard as issues. Critical Thinking assumes no
set agenda of issues that must be addressed. To try to bring someone to
criticality necessarily precludes identifying any fixed set of questions
about particular social, moral, political, economic, and cultural issues,
let alone a fixed set of answers. As already noted, this is not to say that
those involved in the Critical Thinking movement do not think that social
justice is an important issue; nor to say that people such as Ennis, Paul,
and Siegel do not wish to see those sorts of issues addressed — in fact,
they occasionally assert quite explicitly that they do. It is rather that,
as Critical Thinking understands criticality, "impartiality" is a key
virtue. They strive not to push their students along certain lines, nor to
impose certain values (the fact/value distinction is a central thesis of
the analytical tradition that informs much of Critical Thinking). Socially
relevant cases might be pedagogically beneficial as the "raw material" on
which to practice the skills and dispositions of Critical Thinking, because
they are salient for many learners in a classroom. But they are not
intrinsically important to Critical Thinking itself; in many cases purely
symbolic cases could be used to teach the same elements (as in the use of
symbols or empty X’s and Y’s to teach logic).

Hence, Critical Thinking tends to address issues in an item-by-item
fashion, not within a grand scheme with other issues. The issues themselves
may have relations to one another, and they may have connections to broader
themes, but those relations and connections are not the focus of
investigation. What is crucial to the issue at hand is the interplay of an
immediate cluster of evidence, reasons, and arguments. For Critical
Thinking, what is important is to describe the issue, give the various
reasons for and against, and draw out any assumptions (and only those) that
have immediate and direct bearing on the argument. This tends to produce a
more analytical and less wholistic mode of critique.

When Critical Pedagogy talks about power and the way in which it structures
social relations, it inevitably draws from a context, a larger narrative,
within which these issues are framed; and typically sees it as part of the
artificiality and abstractness of Critical Thinking that it does not treat
such matters as central. Critical Pedagogy looks to how an issue relates to
"deeper" explanations — deeper in the sense that they refer to the basic
functioning of power on institutional and societal levels. For Critical
Pedagogy, it makes no sense to talk about issues on a nonrelational,
item-by-item basis. Where Critical Thinking emphasizes the immediate
reasons and assumptions of an argument, Critical Pedagogy wants to draw in
for consideration factors that may appear at first of less immediate
relevance.

We do not want to imply merely that Critical Pedagogy wants people to get
the "big picture" whereas Critical Thinking does not. Oftentimes, their
"big pictures" are simply going to be different. The important point is why
they are different, and the difference resides in the fact that whereas
Critical Thinking is quite reluctant to prescribe any particular context
for a discussion, Critical Pedagogy shows enthusiasm for a particular one —
one that tends to view social matters within a framework of struggles over
social justice, the workings of capitalism, and forms of cultural and
material oppression. As noted, this favoring of a particular narrative
seems to open Critical Pedagogy up to a charge of indoctrination by
Critical Thinking: that everything is up for questioning within Critical
Pedagogy except the categories and premises of Critical Pedagogy itself.
But the Critical Pedagogue’s counter to this is that Critical Thinking’s
apparent "openness" and impartiality simply enshrine many conventional
assumptions as presented by the popular media, traditional textbooks, etc.,
in a manner that intentionally or not teaches political conformity;
*particular* claims are scrutinized critically, while a less visible set of
social norms and practices — including, notably, many particular to the
structure and activities of schooling itself — continue to operate
invisibly in the background.

In short, each of these traditions regards the other as
*insufficiently* critical;
each defines, in terms of its own discourse and priorities, key elements
that it believes the other neglects to address. Each wants to acknowledge a
certain value in the goals the other aspires to, but argues that its means
are inadequate to attain them. What is most interesting, from our
standpoint, is not which of these traditions is "better," but the
fascinating way in which each wants to claim sovereignty over the other;
each claiming to include all the truly beneficial insights of the other,
and yet more — and, as we will see, how each has been subject to criticisms
that may make them appear more as related rivals than as polar opposites.

Criticisms of Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy

It will not have been lost on many readers that when we listed the prime
authors in both the Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions, all
listed were male. There are certainly significant women writing within each
tradition, but the chief spokespersons, and the most visible figures in the
debates between these traditions, have been men. Not surprisingly, then,
both traditions have been subject to criticisms, often from feminists, that
their ostensibly universal categories and issues in fact exclude the voices
and concerns of women and other groups.

In the case of Critical Thinking, as noted earlier, this has typically
taken the form of an attack on the "rationalistic" underpinnings of its
epistemology: that its logic is different from "women’s logic," that its
reliance on empirical evidence excludes other sources of evidence or forms
of verification (experience, emotion, feeling) — in short, that its
masculinist way of knowing is different from "women’s ways of knowing" (for
example, Belenky et al. 1986; Thayer-Bacon 1993). Other arguments do not
denigrate the concerns of Critical Thinking entirely, but simply want to
relegate them to *part* of what we want to accomplish educationally
(Arnstine 1991; Garrison & Phelan 1990; Noddings 1984; Warren 1994). Often
these criticisms, posed by women with distinctive feminist concerns in
mind, also bring in a concern with Critical Thinking’s exclusion or neglect
of ways of thought of other racial or ethnic groups as well — though the
problems of "essentializing" such groups, as if they "naturally" thought
differently from white men, has made some advocates cautious about
overgeneralizing these concerns.

Critical Pedagogy has been subject to similar, and occasionally identical,
criticisms. Claims that Critical Pedagogy is "rationalistic," that its
purported reliance on "open dialogue" in fact masks a closed and paternal
conversation, that it excludes issues and voices that other groups bring to
educational encounters, have been asserted with some force (Ellsworth 1989;
Gore 1993). In this case, the sting of irony is especially strong. After
all, advocates of Critical Thinking would hardly feel the accusation of
being called "rationalistic" as much of an insult; but for Critical
Pedagogy, given its discourse of emancipation, to be accused of being yet
another medium of oppression is a sharp rebuke.

Are these criticisms justified? Certainly the advocates of these traditions
have tried to defend themselves against the accusation of being
"exclusionary" (Siegel 1996; Giroux 1992c). The arguments have been long
and vigorous, and we cannot recount them all here. But without dodging the
matter of taking sides, we would like to suggest a different way of looking
at the issue: *Why* is it that significant audiences see themselves as
excluded from each of these traditions? Are they simply misled; are they
ignorant or ill-willed; are they unwilling to listen to or accept the
reasonable case that advocates of Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy
put forth in response to their objections — or is the very existence of
disenfranchised and alienated audiences a reason for concern, a sign that
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy do not, and perhaps cannot, achieve
the sort of breadth, inclusiveness, and universal liberation they each, in
their own way, promise? We find it impossible to avoid such a conclusion:
that if the continued and well-intended defense and rearticulation of the
reasons for a Critical Thinking or a Critical Pedagogy approach cannot
themselves succeed in persuading those who are skeptical toward them, then
this is prima facie evidence that *something *stands beyond them — that
their aspirations toward a universal liberation, whether a liberation of
the intellect first and foremost, or a liberation of a political
consciousness and praxis, patently do not touch all of the felt concerns
and needs of certain audiences, and that a renewed call for "more of the
same," as if this might eventually win others over, simply pushes such
audiences further away.

For this reason and others we do not want to see an "erasure" of Critical
Thinking by Critical Pedagogy, or vice versa. Though each, from its own
perspective, claims sovereignty over the other, and purports to have the
more encompassing view, we prefer to regard the tension between them as
beneficial. If one values a "critical" perspective at all, then part of
that should entail critique from the most challenging points of view.
Critical Thinking needs to be questioned from the standpoint of social
accountability; it needs to be asked what difference it makes to people’s
real lives; it needs to be challenged when it becomes overly artificial and
abstract; and it needs to be interrogated about the social and
institutional features that promote or inhibit the "critical spirit," for
if such dispositions are central to Critical Thinking, then the conditions
that suppress them cannot be altered or influenced by the teaching of
epistemological rigor alone (Burbules 1992, 1995).

At the same time, Critical Pedagogy needs to be questioned from the
standpoint of Critical Thinking: about what its implicit standards of truth
and evidence are; about the extent to which inquiry, whether individual or
collective, should be unbounded by particular political presuppositions;
about how far it is and is not willing to go in seeing learners question
the authority of their teachers (when the teachers are advocating the
correct "critical" positions); about how open-ended and decentered the
process of dialogue actually is — or whether it is simply a more
egalitarian and humane way of steering students toward certain foregone
conclusions.

And finally, both of these traditions need to be challenged by perspectives
that can plausibly claim that other voices and concerns are not addressed
by their promises. Claims of universalism are especially suspect in a world
of increasingly self-conscious diversity; and whether or not one adopts the
full range of "postmodern" criticisms of rationality and modernity, it
cannot be denied that these are criticisms that must be met, not pushed off
by simply reasserting the promise and hope that "you may not be included or
feel included *yet*, but our theoretical categories and assumptions can
indeed accommodate you without fundamental modification." The responses to
such a defense are easily predictable, and understandable.

One of the most useful critical angles toward both the Critical Thinking
and Critical Pedagogy traditions has been a poststructural examination of
how they exist within a historical context as discursive systems with
particular social effects (Cherryholmes 1988: Gore 1993). The contemporary
challenge to "metanarratives" is sometimes misunderstood as a simple
rejection of any theory at all, a total rejection on anti-epistemological
grounds; but this is not the key point. The challenge of such criticisms is
to examine the effects of metanarratives as ways of framing the world; in
this case, how claims of universality, or impartiality, or inclusiveness,
or objectivity, variously characterize different positions within the
Critical Thinking or Critical Pedagogy schools of thought. Their very
claims to sovereignty, one might say, are more revealing about them (and
from this perspective makes them more deeply akin) than any particular
positions or claims they put forth. It is partly for this reason that we
welcome their unreconciled disputes; it reminds us of something important
about their limitations.

Here, gradually, we have tried to introduce a different way of thinking
about criticality, one that stands outside the traditions of Critical
Thinking and Critical Pedagogy, without taking sides between them, but
regarding each as having a range of benefit and a range of limitation. The
very tension between them teaches us something, in a way that eliminating
either or seeing one gain hegemony would ultimately dissolve. Important
feminist, multiculturalist, and generally postmodernist rejections of
*both* Critical
Thinking and Critical Pedagogy, which we have only been able to sketch
here, are of more recent provenance in educational discourse — but about
them we would say the same. There is something about the preservation of
such sustained differences that yields new insights, something that is lost
when the tension is erased by one perspective gaining (or claiming)
dominance. But the tension is also erased by the pursuit of a liberal
"compromise"; or by the dream of an Hegelian "synthesis" that can reconcile
the opposites; or by a Deweyan attempt to show that the apparent dichotomy
is not real; or by a presumption of incommensurability that makes the sides
decide it is no longer worth engaging one another. *All* of these are ways
of making the agonistic engagement go away. We prefer to think in terms of
a criticality that is *procedural*: What are the conditions that give rise
to critical thinking, that promote a sharp reflection on one’s own
presuppositions, that allow for a fresh rethinking of the conventional,
that foster *thinking in new ways*?

Toward an Alternate Criticality

The starting point of this alternative is reflecting upon criticality as a
*practice* — what is involved in actually thinking critically, what are the
conditions that tend to foster such thinking, and so on. Here we can only
draw the outlines of some of these elements, each of which merits extended
discussion.

First, criticality does involve certain abilities and skills, including but
not limited to the skills of Critical Thinking. These skills have a
definite domain of usefulness, but learning them should include not only an
appreciation for what they can do, but an appreciation for what they cannot
do. For example, methods of analysis, across different disciplines from the
scientific to the philosophic, involve removing the object of study from
its usual context in order (1) to focus study upon it and it only and (2)
to be able to parse it into component elements. This is true of all sorts
of analysis, whether the analysis of an organism, a chemical analysis, or
an analysis of a concept. There is value to doing this, but also a limit,
since removing a thing from its usual context changes it by eliminating the
network of relations that give rise to it, interact with it, and partly
define it. If any amount of wholism is true, then such decontextualizing
and/or dissecting into components *loses* something of the original.

In addition to these logical and analytical skills, we would emphasize that
criticality also involves the ability to think outside a framework of
conventional understandings; it means to think anew, *to think differently*.
This view of criticality goes far beyond the preoccupation with not being
deceived. There might be worse things than being mistaken; there may be
greater dangers in being only trivially or banally "true." Ignorance is one
kind of impotence; an inability or unwillingness to move beyond or question
conventional understandings is another. This is a point that links in some
respects with Freire’s desire to move beyond an "intransitive
consciousness," and with Giroux’s call for a "language of possibility." But
even in these cases there is a givenness to what a "critical" understanding
should look like that threatens to become its own kind of constraint.
Freire’s metaphor for learning to read is "decodification," a revealing
word because it implies a fixed relation of symbol to meaning and reveals
an assumption usually latent within Critical Pedagogy: that the purpose of
critical thinking is to discern a world, a real world of relations,
structures, and social dynamics, that has been obscured by the distortions
of ideology. Learning to "decode" means to find the actual, hidden meaning
of things. It is a revealing choice of words, as opposed to, say,
"interpretation," which also suggests finding a meaning, but which could
also mean *creating* a meaning, or seeking out several alternative
meanings. This latter view could not assume that "critical" literacy and
dialogue would necessarily converge on any single understanding of the
world. Yet it is a crucial aspect of Critical Pedagogy that dialogue does
converge upon a set of understandings tied to a capacity to act toward
social change — and social change of a particular type. Multiple,
unreconciled interpretations, by contrast, might yield *other* sorts of
benefits — those of fecundity and variety over those of solidarity.

Much more needs to be said about how it is possible to think anew, to think
otherwise. But what we wish to stress here is that this is a kind of
criticality, too, a breaking away from convention and cant. Part of what is
necessary for this to happen is an openness to, and a comfort with,
thinking in the midst of deeply challenging alternatives. One obvious
condition here is that such alternatives exist and that they be engaged
with sufficient respect to be considered imaginatively — even when
(especially when) they do not fit in neatly with the categories with which
one is familiar. This is why, as noted earlier, the *tensions* between
radically conflicting views are themselves valuable; and why the etic
perspective is as potentially informative as the emic. Difference is a
condition of criticality, when it is encountered in a context that allows
for translations or communication across differences; when it is taken
seriously, and not distanced as exotic or quaint; and when one does not use
the excuse of "incommensurability" as a reason to abandon dialogue
(Burbules & Rice 1991; Burbules 1993, forthcoming).

Rather than the simple epistemic view of "ideology" as distortion or
misrepresentation, we find it useful here to reflect on Douglas Kellner’s
discussion of the "life cycle" of an ideology (Kellner 1978). An ideology
is not a simple proposition, or even a set of propositions, whose truth
value can be tested against the world. Ideologies have the appeal and
persistence that they do because they actually *do* account for a set of
social experiences and concerns. No thorough approach to ideology-critique
should deny the very real appeal that ideologies hold for people — an
appeal that is as much affective as cognitive. To deny that appeal is to
adopt a very simplistic view of human naiveté, and to assume that it will
be easier to displace ideologies than it actually is. Both the Critical
Thinking and Critical Pedagogy traditions often make this mistake, we
believe. As Kellner puts it, ideologies often have an original appeal as an
"ism," as a radically new, fresh, challenging perspective on social and
political concerns. Over time, the selfsame ideologies become "hegemonic," *not
because they change, but because circumstances change while the ideology
becomes more and more concerned with its own preservation.* What causes
this decline into reification and stasis is precisely the absence of
reflexiveness within ideological thought, the inability to recognize its
own origins and limitations, and the lack of opportunities for thinking
differently. In the sense we are discussing it here, criticality is the
opposite of the hegemonic.

This argument suggests, then, that one important aspect of criticality is
an ability to reflect on one’s own views and assumptions as themselves
features of a particular cultural and historical formation. Such a
reflection does not automatically lead to relativism or a conclusion that
all views are equally valid; but it does make it more difficult to imagine
universality or finality for any particular set of views. Most important,
it regards one’s views as perpetually open to challenge, as choices
entailing a responsibility toward the effects of one’s arguments on others.
This sort of critical reflection is quite difficult to exercise entirely on
one’s own; we are enabled to do it through our conversations with others,
especially others not like us. Almost by definition, it is difficult to see
the limitations and lacunae in our own understandings; hence maintaining
both the social conditions in which such conversations can occur
(conditions of plurality, tolerance, and respect) *as well as* the personal
and interpersonal capacities, and willingness, to engage in such
conversations, becomes a central dimension of criticality — it is not
simply a matter of individual abilities or dispositions. The Critical
Pedagogy tradition has stressed some of these same concerns.

Yet at a still deeper level, the work of Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak,
Judith Butler, and others, challenges us with a further aspect of
criticality: the ability to question and doubt even our own presuppositions
— the ones without which we literally do not know how to think and act
(Burbules 1995). This seemingly paradoxical sort of questioning is often
part of the *process *by which radically new thinking begins: by an aporia;
by a doubt that we do not know (yet) how to move beyond; by imagining what
it might mean to think without some of the very things that make our
(current) thinking meaningful. Here, we have moved into a sense of
criticality well beyond the categories of both Critical Thinking and
Critical Pedagogy; to the extent that these traditions of thought and
practice have become programmatic, become "movements" of a sort, they may
be less able — and less motivated — to pull up their own roots for
examination. Their very success as influential areas of scholarship and
teaching seems to have required a certain insistence about particular ways
of thinking and acting. Can a deeper criticality be maintained under such
circumstances? Or is it threatened by the desire to win over converts?

The perspective of viewing criticality as a practice helps us to see that
criticality is a way of being as well as a way of thinking, a relation to
others as well as an intellectual capacity. To take one concrete instance,
the critical thinker must relish, or at least tolerate, the sense of moving
against the grain of convention — this isn’t separate from criticality or a
"motivation" for it; it is part of what it means to *be critical*, and not
everyone (even those who can master certain logical or analytical skills)
can or will occupy that position. To take another example, in order for
fallibilism to mean anything, a person must be willing to *admit* to being
wrong. We know that some people possess this virtue and others do not; we
also know that certain circumstances and relations encourage the exercise
of such virtues and others do not. Once we unravel these mysteries, we will
see that fostering such virtues will involve much more than Critical
Thinking instruction typically imagines. Here Critical Pedagogy may be
closer to the position we are proposing, as it *begins*with the premise of
social context, the barriers that inhibit critical thought, and the need to
learn through activity.

Furthermore, as soon as one starts examining just what the conditions of
criticality are, it becomes readily apparent that it is not a purely
individual trait. It may involve some individual virtues, but only as they
are formed, expressed, and influenced in actual social circumstances.
Institutions and social relations may foster criticality or suppress it.
Because criticality is a function of collective questioning, criticism, and
creativity, it is *always *social in character, partly because relations to
others influence the individual, and partly because certain of these
activities (particularly thinking in new ways) arise from an interaction
with challenging alternative views (Burbules 1993).

These conditions, then, of personal character, of challenging and
supportive social relations, of communicative opportunities, of contexts of
difference that present us with the possibility of thinking otherwise, are
interdependent circumstances. They are the conditions that allow the
development and exercise of criticality as we have sketched it in this
essay. They are, of course, *educational *conditions. Criticality is a
practice, a mark of what we do, of who we are, and not only how we think.
Critical Thinking and Critical Pedagogy, and their feminist,
multiculturalist, and postmodern critics, apprehend parts of this
conception of criticality. Yet, we find, the deepest insights into
understanding what criticality is come from the unreconciled tensions
amongst them — because it is in remaining open to such challenges without
seeking to dissipate them that criticality reveals its value as a way of
life.

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Walters, Kerry S. (1994). "Beyond logicism in critical thinking." *Re-Thinking
Reason: New Perspectives in Critical Thinking*, Kerry S. Walters, ed.
(Albany: SUNY Press), 1-22.

Weinstein, Mark (1993). "Rational hopes and utopian visions." *Inquiry* vol.
11 no. 3: 1, 16-22.

Wheary, Jennifer and Ennis Robert H. (1995). "Gender bias in critical
thinking: Continuing the dialogue." *Educational Theory,*vol. 45 no. 2:
213-224.

On Sun, Jan 14, 2018 at 2:50 PM, Natalia Gajdamaschko <nataliag@sfu.ca>
wrote:

> Hi Dear All!
> I am in the middle of preparing an invited talk on critical thinking, and
> I need your's, Dear ALL!, help.
> Could you, please, let me know if there is a publication you know and like
> re: "Critical Thinking" within CHAT tradition.
> You can reply to this message or send me an email to nataliag@sfu.ca
> I really appreciate all your help.
> Thank you,
> Natalia.
>



-- 
Robert Lake  Ed.D.
Associate Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144, Statesboro, GA  30460
Co-editor of *Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies,* vol.39,
2017
Special issue: Maxine Greene and the Pedagogy of Social Imagination: An
Intellectual Genealogy.

 http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/gred20/39/1
Webpage: https://georgiasouthern.academia.edu/RobertLake*Democracy must be
born anew in every generation, and education is its midwife.* John
Dewey-*Democracy
and Education*,1916, p. 139