In a nutshell: While critical thinking implies certain intellectual values such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, it does not come prepackaged with political, ethical, or moral values. If we want critical thinking to be an instrument of a liberatory politics, that is a deliberate choice we need to make and put into practice.
Critical thinking: What I mean by it
I’m going to go out on a limb here and define critical thinking as: A set of cognitive processes through which human beings organize information and experience and formulate beliefs, opinions, and values.
You might respond, Isn’t “critical thinking” just thinking? And in some ways, yes, it is. So why do we need this special term to describe something we apparently can’t help doing so long as we are possessed of a conscious mind? Well, I’d say the notion of critical thinking became “a thing” because people—educators and cognitive psychologists in particular–needed a term to refer to a kind of learning that was not based primarily on rote memorization of facts—what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921–1997) famously called the “banking model” of education, in which teachers “deposit” names, dates, definitions, and other prefabricated, prepackaged “facts” in students’ minds like so much cash in the bank, without demanding or, in many cases, permitting (we might even say “broaching”) any critical response on the part of students.
Freire published his groundbreaking and influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed (originally in Portuguese) in 1968 (first English translation 1970). Back in 1956, however, Benjamin Bloom and a group of educational psychologists developed a classification of cognitive processes popularly known as “Bloom’s taxonomy” (revised in the 1990s by a group led by Bloom’s former student Lorin Anderson). In a very concise nutshell, Bloom’s taxonomy identifies knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation as the six fundamental cognitive processes that must be engaged for effective learning. Anderson and his colleagues rechristened “knowledge” as “remembering,” which underscores the extent to which that lowest-level cognitive process is the rote memorization of mere facts on which the banking model of education relies.
Critical thinking, by contrast, works all the levers of cognition, for which I have my own pet terminology that recasts the whole taxonomy in terms of types of knowledge:
- Factual knowledge (identifying facts—the rote memorization part of learning)
- Conceptual knowledge (understanding concepts)
- Procedural knowledge (understanding processes, like combustion or how a bill becomes a law)
- Analytic knowledge (breaking complex ideas down into more basic components)
- Synthetic knowledge (putting facts, concepts, or ideas together to formulate something more complex)
- Evaluative knowledge (making judgments of quality, efficacy, suitability, etc.)
Critical Thinking: What I Want from It
Now, if we only go so far as to define critical thinking as thinking that works all the levers of cognition identified by Bloom’s taxonomy, we remain stalled at a rather vanilla place. That is to say, we go beyond rote memorization in a purely technical sense, but we do not really engage with history, society, or culture in any transformative way. It is this kind of transformative engagement with the human world that Freire’s notion of critical pedagogy implies. So, in sense, I would characterize “critical thinking” as the kind of thinking demanded by critical pedagogy as envisioned by Freire and his followers.
Critical thinking, however, is not the same thing as critical pedagogy, for at least two major reasons. One, critical pedagogy is an approach to pedagogy, to teaching and learning in schools, colleges, universities, and other (especially community-based) educational settings. Critical thinking, by contrast, is an approach to thinking per se, not necessarily in educational or academic contexts, but more as a matter of intellectual discipline or self-discipline (ascesis). Two, critical thinking would still be critical thinking even if it did not engage with the human world in a transformative manner, as long as it approached its object of knowledge via the range of cognitive modalities identified by Bloom (and summarized above). Critical pedagogy, like critical theory, is by history and definition not only a transformative but also a liberatory mode of engagement with the world. Critical thinking, by contrast, need not have this liberatory dimension. Should we so choose, we could employ critical thinking to dominate, enslave, and deprive people of rights and privileges. Critical thinking, in this respect, is value neutral, and does not come associated with a specific politics or agenda.
That being said, we human beings, even as critical thinkers, cannot help but have a politics, cannot help but have an agenda, whether we are aware of it, whether we acknowledge it or not. I would always prefer to see critical thinking employed in the service of a progressive, liberatory political agenda that seeks to resist oppression and extend freedom. That is to say, I would always prefer to see critical thinking in the service of critical pedagogy, critical theory, and modes of liberatory cultural practice and performance that I would call critical culture.