BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO CLEAR, CRITICAL, AND ANALYTICAL THINKING

PREFACE

This website was created initially as the culmination of many years of classroom presentation of the subject, Clear, Critical, and Analytical Thinking, now incorrectly but conventionally called “Critical Thinking,” starting on the high school level, to fill what I consider to be an urgent need not only for the pre-college student but for college freshmen as well.

It is my hope that the website will stimulate an awareness of the need for our euphemistically called “educational” institutions to awaken to their enormous failure to emphasize the study of our abuses of language in which we conflate falsifiable and verifiable language with unfalsifiable and unverifiable language, terms few students ever hear or know the usages of, to the point of designating them equal in clarity of communication. Such a failure is the catalyst for the exponential rise of the ills of the world.

Historically, there have been thinkers before me, unheeded, who have repeatedly stated that the development of “critical thinking” is an essential but unfulfilled need.

Teachers across the nation, however, since it has become a shibboleth of our age, insist they teach it. Few of them understand the complexity of the subject or that it cannot be instilled in a student by an osmotic residue in teaching another subject.

It requires special attention and effort as an autonomous study in which special concepts and language that most subjects do not require and most teachers do not have in their vocabulary are essential to understand. More worrisome, however, is that there appears to be little concern for the damage our failure to address the issue creates.

Following is a lecture I presented some 40 years ago delineating my concerns and what measures are absolutely required to correct this gross failure of our inattentive monolithic pre-college institutions to take heed to the admonitions of some of the greatest minds in the history of thought.

ON HOW TO THINK VS WHAT TO THINK

This lecture with minor corrections and additions was presented at the Honor Society Banquet on a Wednesday evening, in 1968 at 7:00 p.m. at the Junior High School in Bemidji, Minnesota.

This evening I should like to avoid making pleasant platitudes and agreeable and pithy remarks. I shall, too, forsake the usual opening joke that is so often a function of language used by speakers to warm an audience to their presentations. Because I address an honors group and because their parents fall, in large respect, into this category also, I should like to appeal to your sense of right and reason, to your minds.

If what I say sounds somewhat harsh, please know that it is my deep concern, whether I be right or wrong, for you and for students in general, for our nation, and for our world that induces me to speak out in regard to what I consider to be a gross and crucial failure on the part of American education, college and pre-college alike.

May I hasten to say, however, that our schools do accomplish the near impossible, i.e., schooling for all, commendably well.

But I have not set for myself this evening the task of delineating Education’s achievements. Rather, I wish to dwell on its failure to teach our students to think clearly, critically, and analytically.

Scholarship at its very least must mean the inculcation of clarity of thought, critical, and analytical acuity. Rarely is clear thinking acquired to any significant degree by rote learning or by parroted phraseologies.

This, in essence, is what I would like to convey to you this evening before you are let loose upon the world, or more to the point before the world is let loose upon you.

It can be a dangerous place out there, full of quagmires of deceit, and unfair and immoral competition. But it is also the open sesame to things of beauty, happiness and wisdom, to glorious accomplishments for mankind. You are the catalyst. You can be the makers, in this case the remakers of the world.

Obviously we adults have botched it up—badly. So will you if education continues to be, as it seems to be, not any different from what we received.

In any event, you must seek help from every conceivable source: from science, philosophy, teachers, parents, friends, your church, even from the simple wisdom and curiosity of your baby brother and sister.

More than that your sources constitute every corner of the earth, not to mention vaster frontiers opening to us, such as the far reaches of space, the depths of the ocean, and the micro-domain.

It should be evident by now, however, that if these are to be the sources of your help, your advice, your knowledge, your truths, that the multiplicity of the sources means a multiplicity of conflicting opinions, truths, and knowledge.

You must ask yourselves, then, “Who is right?” “What are the true answers among all these purported true answers?” For instance, which history text about the Civil war is the correct account, that of the South? The North? A French account of it? An English or a Russian?

Does any institution, any one person or group of persons have priority on truth and knowledge? Certainly not! That is one hot line that doesn’t exist. There is no person on this earth, be he scientist, mathematician, teacher, or what have you, who is not a human being; and one aspect of a human being is a large propensity for being wrong most of the time. History attests to that.

But it is by correcting our mistakes that man has acquired some semblance of truth and knowledge. We constantly exchange new truths for those that become false or at least inadequate for our needs. To paraphrase John Dewey, today’s truths are tomorrow’s errors. For instance, consider the history or our knowledge concerning the shape of the earth.

The usefulness or uselessness of an idea to society is not sufficient to insist upon or to deny its truth or falsity. Furthermore a seeker after truth cannot afford to be afraid of truth or falsity or to be intimidated by threat of ostracism, oppression, or disagreeable looks form his neighbors, friends, and enemies.

To do so is to deprive mankind of many possible profound or even merely useful ideas for the sake of security, comfort, the approbation of the ignorant, the frightened, or the insecure.

In education, the student should be the teacher’s respectful antagonist lest the latter slip into hard formulas of truth untested by the sharpness of curious, vigorous, and incisive minds.

But today’s institutions are not nor will they, for years and perhaps decades hence, be ready or equipped for the classroom to become the arena of a battle of wits between the “learned” and the learner.

Instead, the “learned” propound and the learner” accepts. At the year’s end, truth and knowledge too often become education’s casualties because some of the most inane ideas are unquestioningly accepted.

Yesterday’s truths will remain yesterday’s truth because education has become the passing on from one generation of teachers to another of student teachers a body of irrelevant data of the past and present.

The unexamined idea must remain suspect and no idea is properly examined in today’s classrooms unless the concepts of the teacher and the textbook are permitted to be contested openly and freely – unless at least two truly held conflicting opinions wage war discursively – respectfully and without rancor – not once, but whenever two minds disagree.

If one plans to enter the arena of conflicting ideas, however, one has an obligation to prepare for it and there is no more arduous preparation than that of learning to think clearly, critically, and analytically.

Such training is made all the more difficult because one must, in the process, learn also not to destroy the spirit of humanity, love and concern for one’s fellow man, the perspective of humility, a sense of beauty, the ability to see things whole as well as in parts.

In other words, in becoming thinkers, we must be careful not to become pedants or snobs; otherwise, the benefits of learning will be lost.

But the method of developing thinkers has been traditionally relegated to the category marked “by-product.” To some small degree, thinking does emerge as a by-product.

But it can easily be shown that one does not become a thinker merely by being highly trained in one of the usual academic disciplines and superficially trained in some of the others.

For instance, one becomes only a limited thinker by majoring in physics and minoring in English. It is a fact that many good scientists know less about what is science than do some non-scientists.

It is ever a source of amazement that people, “educated” and uneducated alike, will spend years training to play baseball or to manipulate mathematical symbols or chemicals in a test tube, but naively believe that thinking (the most difficult of all mental activities) requires no special preparation at all.

If one wishes to become a thinker, he must take special training and education, just as he must to become a physicist, a baseball player or a pianist. But, in the words of the philosopher, John Stuart Mill:

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.”

Let us, however, emphasize the three words, “as a thinker.”

Becoming a thinker is accomplished through the act and study of thinking under the guidance of those qualified to teach that mental activity.

For instance, some of the relevant tools are the recognition of hidden contradictions, the exposure of innumerable subtle assumptions, the art of reasoning, and the discussion of some of our most vague and abstract concepts for their multiplicities of meanings.

Every academic discipline is founded on such assumptions and concepts that the experts, themselves, have not been taught to recognize. Hence, they are unable to pass such education on to their students.

An examination of language, truth, and knowledge constitutes the essence of the only education that can stimulate constant self-renewal primarily because one learns thereby that the evidence is never all in.

But language is the greatest enemy of truth and knowledge, since no symbol has an inherent meaning; while at the same time it is the closest friend they’ve got. Were it not for language, we would be animals still.

To the degree that one does not understand the complexities of language to that degree he is less human. I do not mean by a study of language a study of English.

Language is far more than merely the written and spoken word. English too, then, is often a sophisticated form of training.

By a study of language, i.e., the attribution of meaning, I mean an examination of the meanings each of us attributes to the symbols that temporarily, momentarily, or conventionally “carry” our attributions and their impact on human relations as well as on obtaining truth and knowledge.

Such a study enables one to discover quite simply when language is being used to express truth and knowledge as opposed to when it is used to manipulate people or to express one’s emotions.

It is as highly technical as (and even more so for some) other academic subjects. Yet no such courses are offered except in a few colleges or to philosophy majors.

Our lack of understanding of language, our misuse and abuse of language, attest to the dismal failure of education in this regard.

The closest education comes to the subject is an occasional reading of books (or very small parts thereof) like Hayakawa’s Language In Thought And Action and Stuart Chase’s The Tyranny Of Words in which he so cogently observes:

Language is no more than crudely acquired before children begin to suffer from it, and to misinterpret the world by reason of it. Is the fault to be charged to the child or to the language taught him?

I feel compelled to add: or to our institutions, teachers, parents, and cultures that have criminally ignored the issue for millennia?

English courses sometimes allow a week or two for a superficial discussion of such ideas.

An example of language at work having little to do with truth and knowledge is that used by the salesperson. For instance, when a famous actor is paid to read an advertising statement on TV, what does he mean by his words when he describes the product? He is not an expert or an engineer. He does not really understand his product. His words do not convey truth or knowledge about the mechanics or quality of his product.

The language merely functions to induce you to purchase the product or sign on the dotted line. When politicians speak to you for hours, their conflicting words serve the function, not to give truth and knowledge, but to induce you to give them your vote.

When you quarrel with you spouse, if you cannot determine that often the verbal tit for tat expressed with extreme intense emotion is not meant to be taken literally, it often results in divorce.

If you have not made an in-depth study of the many functions of language, you can rarely recognize when it relates to truth and knowledge or when it merely appears even sometimes to the trained mind to do so.

We use words like justice, democracy, courage, but their attributed meanings are as multiple as the numbers of people using them.

By the same token you are unable to recognize the meanings attributed to the terms, ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge.’ These concepts, too, are as difficult to understand, as are the others.

The truth and knowledge of which I speak are the jewels we hope to discover on the endless avenues of language. I speak of them as reflective activities, not as the facts in a textbook or the instinctive “knowledge” of lower animals. It has even been said that the only real knowledge there is “is knowing the right questions to ask.”

As to truth, there are two basic ways to acquire it. The first, by stumbling upon it, often without awareness, in free discussion with unprepared minds; and the second by taking the long hard road of special training that results in the revelation and awareness that truth is not always a matter of hard and easy superficial parroting.

For example, a young child is taught that her pencil is “yellow.” Most young children could easily understand what science has verified: that the pencil absorbs every other color while rejecting the yellow color. High school seniors, and even college graduates have been taught to believe that the equation, 1+1=2 is true. For multiple reasons, they have not learned that 1 +1 may equal 2, but need not. To have learned that 1+1 must equal 2 is extremely poor education even though, for practical reasons, it may be declared by some to be a trivial bit of knowledge when it is learned that it need not.

More important, is the fact that even in the case of some PhDs, few of us have learned that language does not describe a reality beyond our perceptions; rather it expresses the content of our “minds.”

When that kind or erroneous knowledge is compounded by the innumerable so-called facts of knowledge that constitute from 12 to 16 years of “education,” it is considerably easier to recognize the failure of education to make good thinkers of our students.

Truth is not what it appears to be by the general public; nor is knowledge.

Clarity of thought cannot be developed by teaching a “truth” of language in one context and ignoring its falsity in another.

Clarity of thought in language, truth, and knowledge is achieved only to the degree to which subtle distinctions, sometimes “trivial” sometimes capable of catastrophic consequences, are exposed to the mind, and only when an awareness of such subtle distinctions brings to the whole, new significance previously unrecognized.

The great failure of our educational institutions is that the sharpness of the mind that this kind of education can develop is denied our students; and the coffers of our nation are a party to that failure.

We spend billions of dollars to propagate training in subjects that we consider vital to our survival as a nation, while that very training leads to the destruction of the life-giving processes not only of our nation, but also of the whole world. We spend equal sums on the arts and sports arenas and gymnasiums for the aggrandizement and prestige of our schools and as a place of entertainment for our children’s parents rather than fortifying the very basis or our society – the ability and willingness to think well.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not opposed to reasonable expenditures for such purposes. Some of my most pleasant memories stem from music, the arts, and other forms of school-oriented entertainment. In some ways they, too, aid in the development of incisive minds.

But such studies will not give us the incisive thinking, the insights, the concepts that are needed to solve our social ills and to avoid the destruction of the world’s environment.

It is a matter of priorities because our educators and our parents have assumed that simple declarations of our most tangible needs and our immediate desires are synonymous with truth and knowledge; and students tend to accept the word of authority as positive proof of truth and knowledge.

Of course one must have respect for authority. But respect is not synonymous with blind acceptance. It is always easy, however, to follow the dictates of authority when they are in accord with our own needs, emotional or physical. Out of the assumed truths of propaganda about immediate and selfish needs, we arrive at the wrong priorities.

It is not likely that this could happen to a citizenry educated to understand the many ways in which language is used for ulterior motives – ways in which language has no bearing on truth and knowledge but can be used successfully to bend one to the motivations or the tyranny of other minds – most often manifested in the opinions of a conforming majority – local or national, and sometimes in a vociferous minority.

Our students do not retain much of their rote learning when they leave the classrooms to embark upon life; but if their education were designed to open their minds to many avenues of thought, to consideration of opposing views, to an examination of their pet prejudices and preconceptions that have become the triggers to their emotions, they could not shuck such an acquired attitude as easily as they forget textbook facts.

Attitudes of open-mindedness are not memories and once acquired (though they can be destroyed) unlike memories, they cannot be forgotten or ignored.

Rather, they constitute a viable way of dealing intelligently and objectively with the exigencies of life. One such attitude is that of the questioning mind with which all of us seem to have been born but which some time early in the schooling process most of us have lost.

Freedom of inquiry that is nurtured by questioning minds, and that entails the right and the capacity to inquire, is one of our fundamental precepts of democracy. But our schooling establishments (with some rare exceptions) though obliged to “teach” democracy, do in most instances destroy the capacity for this fundamental precept.

It can be shown, statistically, that in American schooling institutions, the number of students asking questions and the number of questions they ask are inversely proportional to the number of years the students spend in classrooms.

Without considering the role of the teacher’s contributory attitudes, I shall turn now to one of the causes for this negative development in our schools that manifests itself in the de-emphasizing of clear thinking. I should like first to quote John Dewey, a renowned philosopher in the history of American education:

Personality must be educated, and personality cannot be educated by confining its operations to technical and specialized things, or to the less important relationships of life. (Reconstruction in Philosophy,” p. 475)

Our industrially oriented civilization, including our educational monolith, has, at great cost to our nation and our world, ignored Dewey’s admonition.

Moreover, our teachers and school authorities are unwitting, or even probably, willing accomplices. [I say this on the basis of over fifty years of pioneering introducing critical thinking classes on the pre- college level.

Even as recently as a few months ago, I was ignored when I offered to teach the course again in the local high school where in 1960 I introduced it and taught it for eight years until moving on to teaching on the college level. The course was not continued with the excuse that a teacher of the subject could not be found to replace me.]

The demands of business (big and small) have infiltrated to the core or our conforming schooling institutions.

The latter have evolved into diploma and degree mills, grinding out what amounts to union cards (for specialized categories of students) stamped “physicist,” “chemist,” “mathematician,” “teacher,” and so on.

They do, of course, prepare us for national survival against military attack. But “national survival” loosely interpreted, too often constitutes a threat to the survival, the environmental wealth, the well-being, the sovereignty, and the autonomy of other nations. The end result can be the end of survival for all.

Whatever is the significance of preparation for survival, however, we have been (in the process) blinded to the equally dreaded enemies to which categorical training leads – democracy’s worst enemies – conformity and mediocrity.

Our schools have become the training camps and supply depots for the soldiers not only of the military but also of industry, the kitchen, the sports arena, and the local garage.

A frightening prospect is the clear evidence that many of the skills presently taught will, in the near future, become obsolete.

What of the unprepared mind? Is it not, also, obsolete?

After all, the mind has the capacity to change only to the degree to which it had been prepared to be open-minded and flexible.

But such preparation having been sadly neglected, such minds become liabilities (in need of repair) rather than assets to a world crying for solutions to staggering social, political, religious, ethical, cultural, not to mention educational ills.

This is so, largely because our students have not been offered course studies in value, in examining philosophical concepts – social, political, ethical, etc., no understanding of which can be achieved to any significant degree in the absence of studies about the nature of language, truth, and knowledge. These are the fundamental categories to all understanding.

Ultimately, it is the attitude of people that influences the course of events.

Yet, it is the development of attitudes we neglect most.

The world becomes only what its inhabitants allow it to be. And the people receive primarily only what the tyrannical and traditionally stratified majority opinion will allow with little protection for minority opinion.

Thus, the progress of the world toward the solution of such problems as pollution, population growth, crime, bad and greedy business ethics with excessive lobbying influence on governing policies, unfair treatment of ethnic minorities, and so on is slowed down to a snail’s Sunday stroll by the dearth of originality of thought – by the calcified industrial and majority oriented conformity disguised in a deceptive reflection of individuality.

We can no longer ignore the ills of the world in the name of nationalism, nor can we solve them if we do not recognize that our local, parochial and provincial truths, whether they come from teachers of from the “man in the street,” are no longer truths in other and larger contexts.

It follows then, that so long as our schools and our “educators” ignore the significance of study into the nature of language, truth, and knowledge, we cannot expect our students to develop attitudes of open-mindedness; certainly we cannot when they are made to believe that they are already acquiring truth and knowledge and final answers.

When they do so believe, they feel no need for any mental exercise except memory with which to sponge up the established truths.

If our teachers do not teach our students that language, truth, and knowledge are complex concepts not to be accepted in their mediaeval and stereotyped forms, how, then, will they ever learn that textbook data, teachers’ dicta, encyclopedic facts and scientific, social, and educational pronouncements are only provisional truth and knowledge playing an immediate and practical role in a present situation awaiting however, the corrective evidence that continued study, inquiry and diversity of new ideas inevitably bring?

Almost everyone knows that a questioning and curious mind cannot be developed by feeding old ideas into the mental hopper and by ridiculing new ones, however, irrelevant they may be.

But new ideas are often undesirable and frightening merely because they disturb the authoritative ego, the comfort, the security, and the false sense of stability generated by the old.

Only if teachers cease to act as authorities on final truths and instead become authorities on what are the prevalent and conflicting opinions of the day is it possible to create an atmosphere of open-mindedness.

I strongly urge you young honor students to seek out such teachers and to subject yourselves predominantly to their inspiring influences.

In the atmosphere of their classrooms, new attitudes are encouraged and instilled, the students’ original curiosity can be nursed and nurtured back to its natural propensities, apathy will die and stagnating conformity will dissolve.

If once you experience the view from the mountaintop you no longer will be content with the limits of the valley.

SEE FILE 21: PERENNIAL QUESTIONS