Compelling people to realize the deep significance of critical thinking in human societies is difficult. Though most everyone would say that critical thinking is important (studies are increasingly illuminating this), the same people likely see themselves as the real critical thinkers, while it is those others who do not think critically. But in fact, the evidence is around us every day that, on many broad and narrow fronts, in every part of human life, we humans often fail miserably when it comes to applying the basic standards of criticality.
We can look to any number of examples for evidence of this. Consider, for instance, the fact that our students are no longer safe in our schools. Any of our students, at any age, may be subjected to being mowed down by a deranged person with the means to kill scores of people, within just a few minutes, using a legally-purchased assault weapon. Because the adults in our country are not making wise decisions about the use and proliferation of guns, our students are rising up and pleading for safe educational environments.
As education reformers, we at the Foundation for Critical Thinking are highly concerned about the impact of these realities on the future of education. For several decades at least, many of our best teachers have already fled from the esteemed and essential goal of educating the minds of our children. In my almost 25-year tenure at the Foundation, I have found that reforming education is becoming increasingly difficult, due in large degree to the role of money and politics in schooling. Now add to this the fact that many students are now continually fearful at school, and teachers are being thrust into the highly inappropriate role of defending these students should a gunman enter. These realities point up a host of serious negative implications for the future of education in this country. Already teachers largely lack the tools of critical thinking, since they are seldom taught these tools in their own educational backgrounds. If these teachers are now also asked, in effect, to become police officers, the case for education seems to be almost fully hopeless. The gun industry will win, however, because they will make loads of dollars arming teachers, administrators, and patrol officers at schools.
Though we possess the tools at hand to bring intellectual development to our students, of the type Socrates argued for 2,400 years ago, the barriers we face seem to make this an increasingly distant possibility. Perhaps at some future time in our history, we will have more sense than we appear to have at present.
Until we see sense, we will instead see more and more "educational" money going to securing our schools from emotionally-unbalanced persons with assault weapons. Meanwhile, there will continue to be almost no funding, relatively speaking, for bringing critical thinking into our schools, colleges, and universities.
We applaud all of your good efforts toward advancing critical thinking on your home turf. For those of you who can join us, I will be giving a public lecture at Universidad VERITAS in San José, Costa Rica on May 24
th, 2018. See the flyer for this event beneath my signature below, or see the full-resolution, downloadable copy
here.
And I do so hope to see all of you at our upcoming International Conference, near San Francisco, in July.
Read about the conference here. We need everybody on board so that we have a better chance of bringing the tools of criticality to our students, to our work, and to all of our relationships.
In Solidarity for Saving Our Schools Through Critical Thinking,
Dr. Linda Elder
Educational Psychologist
President and Senior Fellow
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