In this week’s Clarion Call guest writer Professor Stephen Zelnick of Temple University takes a look at one of the great buzzwords of higher education these days — “critical thinking.” We hear again and again that it is one of the foremost goals of colleges and universities to teach students to “think critically.”
Sounds good, as though schools were requiring students to take courses where the identification of fallacious reasoning and the misleading use of statistics were covered.
But that isn’t it at all.
As Zelnick points out, “critical thinking” just means imparting a set of attitudes to students, attitudes that are critical of the United States, western culture, capitalism and other hobgoblins of the left. In fact, since shibboleths such as “capitalism exploits workers” and “the United States is institutionally racist” are spoon fed to students without any analysis, it amounts to the antithesis of critical thinking.
