A Check-List for Critical Thinkers
Do you believe whatever you read, or do you read books and articles with different viewpoints to determine which view is more convincing?
Do you believe whatever you’re taught, or do your teachers give you at least three different viewpoints and encourage you to choose which view is right?
If you’re taught only one viewpoint, how do you know if that viewpoint is right without knowing the others, or that it’s not right-wing, left-wing, or mainstream propaganda?
Do you ask your teachers for other views if they don’t present them to be able to decide for yourself which view is right?
Do you read your textbooks, especially those in history and the other social sciences, with a skeptical eye, or simply believe what they say?
Do your teachers alert you to the bias of the textbook you’re using, and tell you why they chose it rather than another, unless it was chosen by a school official or a member of the board?
What might be going on if a school official or board member chose the text?
Can you imagine such censorship in these enlightened times to ensure that “official truth” alone is taught?
Do you ask your teachers to recommend books with different viewpoints on the topics they’re teaching?
When you’re reading novels, plays, and poetry in class, do you discuss a number of different interpretations or only one?
If you’re reading non-fiction, are you encouraged to suspend judgment about the truth of what you’re reading until you’re taught the other views as well?
Do you always keep an open mind by suspending judgment until you’ve read at least three books or articles that argue different viewpoints?
When you learn only one viewpoint about anything, how do you know it’s right? It takes at least two different viewpoints to get you thinking.
Learning only one viewpoint is dangerous because it creates the mistaken impression that no other viewpoints exist.
Of course, there are some questions like slavery or anti-semitism that have only one viewpoint, unless you wanted to argue that slavery is good like a Roman or Southern slaveowner or that anti-semitism is good like Adolf Hitler.
If everything you were taught about the American Revolution, the Mexican-American War, the American Civil War, and the First and Second World Wars were taught from the viewpoints of both sides, wouldn’t that be more interesting?
If you don’t want to develop your mind, learn only one viewpoint about everything. It’s conflict or a difference of opinion that makes something interesting. Others would argue that it’s dangerous. Why would they think that? What would be the rebuttal and counter-rebuttal?
But if you’re taught only one viewpoint, how do you know that you aren’t being brainwashed intentionally or unintentionally?
Or are there two different kinds of brainwashing — a good kind and a bad kind? The good kind is what we think, and the bad kind what others think.
Are you being taught critical thinking in school? For instance, are you taught how to find weaknesses in a theory or its line of argumentation?
Are you taught to spot fallacies or incorrect ways of reasoning? Some arguments contain one or more fallacies. Political discourse is the Happy Hunting Grounds of fallacies. As is Talk Radio! If you know your fallacies, just listen sometime — if you can stop laughing, that is, at all the fallacies you hear.
Knowing how to spot fallacies enables you to detect weaknesses in your or someone else’s thinking. Detecting fallacies is one of the main critical-thinking skills, and if you’re serious about how to think critically, fallacies are a sine qua non.
Is one man’s propaganda another man’s truth?
What is better: to read propaganda and know that it’s propaganda, or not to know it?
How would you read something if you knew it was propaganda?
If you didn’t know?
If you read two articles that very convincingly argue the opposite viewpoint, how would you determine which view was right?
Some people believe the first view they’re taught or read about anything, and continue to believe that for the rest of their lives, failing to realize that it was just by chance that they happened to learn that view first instead of another.
Some aren’t comfortable with being uncertain, so they believe the first theory or book they read or are taught because they can’t stand the tension of being uncertain or because everybody they know also believes it. They need an instant answer to find peace of mind.
When they do learn another view that challenges what they already think, their mind is already made up, and they reject that new viewpoint.
Now that wouldn’t mean that what they were first taught was necessarily wrong, but that they’d never know until they first researched the opposing views for themselves. True or false?
Hominem experiri multa paupertas iubet. Poverty forces a man to try many things. (Publilius Syrus, Maxims, 247). Like Jean Valjean stealing bread to feed a starving family in Les Miserables? Is it really a crime to want to feed your family when you’ve tried to find work and there isn’t any? Are such “crimes” on the part of the poor an indictment of that nation itself rather than those who steal bread so their families won’t starve? Argue both sides.
Get Frank Breslin’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Is the law on the side of the rich or the poor, or is it neutral?
Do the rich or the poor write the laws?
Or the corporations and their lobbyists?
Do the poor deserve to be poor because they’re lazy, or because they’re trapped in a game rigged against them by the rich and powerful?
Role-play Jean Valjean’s defense attorney and plead his case. Then role-play Javert, who prosecutes him. Then role-play God and how he would judge such a case.
Or is it dangerous to role-play because you might have your eyes opened by understanding how the other side sees the world, or that you might be wrong or not as right as you once thought you were?
There used to be bread riots in Europe because the people were starving and desperate. They cried out, why does God permit our suffering to go on? The churches, synagogues, and mosques always helped the poor as much as they could, but half of Congress today washes it hands of them and tells the clergy that they should do even more, since it’s not the responsibility of government to care for the poor but to cut their food stamps because FDR’s New Deal is over and done with. Argue both sides.
And, besides, government has more important things to do with your money than helping the poor.
Half of Congress believes that it has no responsibility for health care for the people of our country, while members of Congress themselves enjoy a generous health package and other health perks and pay only 28 percent of their annual premiums. Liberal propaganda?
Ayn Rand’s novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and her novella, Anthem, are widely seen as right-wing propaganda along the lines of Social Darwinism that preaches a Gospel of Selfishness and Privatization as opposed to Solidarity and the Common Good. She dismisses the poor and the weak as parasites to be ignored by government. Her novels, popular among some American politicians, are sometimes taught in schools where teachers have students argue both for and against the novel’s bias.
Apropos bias, it’s interesting to read two different accounts of a labor strike from the viewpoints of both management and labor.
Why would they differ?
Why do you have to read or hear both sides of any case in a court of law?
Why not read only one and save time?
Are your history textbooks biased and written from the viewpoint of management, or labor, or both? Are they national propaganda? Are your courses taught from both viewpoints, or only from one?
There’s a point of view that maintains that bias is inevitable, and that the only way of dealing with this is by teaching all points of view along with their respective biases and having students draw their own conclusions. Evaluate that viewpoint.
Are you being indoctrinated with a labor or a management bias, or do you get both sides of the story?
If your teacher gives you both sides, do you have a chance to discuss which side you think is right and why?
Are you given reading assignments that reflect both biases?
Are the newspapers you read biased toward labor or management, or are they balanced?
Why not choose one side over the other and view your side as true and the other side as propaganda, or should you keep an open mind?
How were you brought up — pro-labor or pro-management? What if you had been brought up the other way?
Does your upbringing condition how you view the world?
Does that mean that you’re a puppet of your environment?
What is the meaning of this quotation? He who controls the past, controls the future; and he who controls the present controls the past.
Education is supposed to teach you the truth, but doesn’t critical thinking cause confusion? Why not simply be taught the truth? If you’re a skeptical or critical-thinking student, what is your reaction to the preceding question?
Can you think of any reason why government wouldn’t want students to learn the art of critical thinking?
After you name a few, how would you evaluate those reasons?
How are you being taught now in high school or college?
Are you spoon-fed the “correct” answers, or encouraged to think for yourself?
Is your education a subtle or obvious form of indoctrination, brainwashing, propaganda, or mind control, or are you taught to think for yourself?
If you want to kearn about 20 different fallacies, statement classification, facts, value judgments, explanations, metaphysical theories, conditioning factors, and role-play, consult the articles I’ve put online on the Medium platform.
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system.
