Spinning the Cognitive Wheels

"I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students." - Carl Sagan
 
"Critical Thinking" - these two words are almost ubiquitous in the world of higher learning. I can't recall a single course throughout my meager undergraduate experience that did not spend at least some portion of its curriculum on the fundamental importance of critical thinking. After all, isn't the ability to critically analyze, and contribute to the evolution of any given field, at the heart of higher learning?

Unfortunately, as they usually do, such platonic scholarly ideals remain unrealized within the boundaries of real academic culture. Dogmatic teaching, biased interpretation, and simply bad science, are all prevalent, at least within my anecdotal experiences. Yet all these are wrapped and sold to us as critical thinking, careful analysis, and an empirical evaluation of data. How can such dichotomy be so salient?

The answer, in my opinion, is rather simple. We students, and a large portion of our educated faculty, simply lack the language to articulate true critical thinking. Critical thinking becomes something that we are told to do, rather to comprehend; it becomes a product, rather than a set of tools. Engaging in learning and science without being given the appropriate language, and taught how to use it, is inherently recursive. Without a firm grasp, which I would adamantly argue most of our academic world lacks, of elementary concepts such as confirmation biases, cognitive heuristics, regressions to the mean, and many other fundamental tools in critical thinking, we remain spinning our wheels without being able to measure how fast we are really going, and whether we are actually facing the right direction

Rather than attempting to turn us young minds into critical thinkers, perhaps it would be far more effective for our educators to first understand that critical thinking is not a component of the acquisition of knowledge, but rather its underlying language. Such understanding is much too far and between. How many other dormant skeptics, such as I used to be, remain out there as a consequence, simply lacking the language to recognize themselves as such?

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