Some Questions about Critical Thinking for High-School Students
Please note: Some of these questions are purposely repetitious.
Do you believe whatever you read, or do you first hold it at bay to evaluate what you’re reading?
Do you try to read at least three different viewpoints on any subject to determine which viewpoint is most 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 you think is right?
If you’re routinely taught only one viewpoint about everything you’re being taught, 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?
Did it ever occur to you that if you are being taught only one view about everything that you’re being brainwashed?
Not intentionally, but because the teacher thinks that it’s the truth. If that’s the case, which it very well may be, could you still be being brainwashed even though the teacher may be sincere?
Does a teacher owe it to you to give you at least three different viewpoints to give you a chance to decide for yourself which view is correct?
Do you read your textbooks, especially those in history and the other social sciences with a skeptical, critical 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 text, unless it was chosen by a school official or a member of the board?
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 a few more books that argue other viewpoints?
It’s only after you’ve finished at least three books with different viewpoints about the same question that you can begin thinking about which view is right.
However, when you learn only one viewpoint about anything, it may not make any impression on you at all because only one viewpoint is always uninteresting.
It takes at least three to raise a spark of interest or, depending on the topic, a raging conflagration!
Of course, there are some questions like slavery or antisemitism that have only one point of view, unless you wanted to argue that slavery is good like a Roman or Southern slaveholder or that antisemitism 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, would that be more interesting or not? Explain your answer.
Is being taught the views of the other side wrong or necessary if you want to be fair-minded? Explain you answer, and then argue the converse
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 and only then that you discover your mind.
But if you’re taught only one viewpoint, how do you know that you aren’t being brainwashed unintentionally?
Or are there two different kinds of brainwashing — a good kind and a bad kind? The good kind is what we learn; the bad kind what others learn.
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Are you being taught critical thinking in school? For instance, are you taught how to find weaknesses in a theory or a line of argumentation?
Are you taught about fallacies or incorrect ways of reasoning? Most 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!
Knowing how to spot fallacies enables you to detect weaknesses in your own 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.
Do you know how to classify different kinds of statements to be able to dissect a line of argumentation into facts, value judgments, explanatory and metaphysical theories, and which can be proven and which cannot, and why?
Do you understand how conditioning factors can affect your judgment without your even being aware of them? These factors include your gender, your habits of thinking, your age, nationality, the century in which you live, your profession or occupation, your physical environment (city or rural), your political party, marital status, social class, religion, race, degree of education, the kind of childhood you had, your temperament, physical appearance, and the media, as well as an assortment of different psychological factors.
All of these factors can be doing your thinking for you, whereas you may think that you’re an autonomous thinker when all of these factors may be affecting your thinking and judgment without your even realizing it.
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 argued the opposite viewpoint, how would you determine which view is 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 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 or necessarily right, but that they’d never know unless they researched the opposing views.
How many of your present views or beliefs are held because you’ve examined both sides of the question?
Leaving Plato’s Cave
If you were born and raised in another century in a different part of the world, of different parents, of a different race, religion, and social class, do you think that you would have an entirely different set of beliefs and view of the world that would be different from the beliefs you have now?
If that’s the case, would all these different factors contribute to how you viewed yourself, life, and the world?
If it’s all a matter of chance then as to where and when you were born, what would that mean with respect to what you believe now?
Would you still hold these beliefs or not?
If not, does that mean that we’re all creatures of our environment? That truth is only what we’re used to believing and that’s why we think those beliefs are true?
But what if those beliefs really are true?
And if so, how would we prove that they are true?
Or do we have to prove them as long as we’re comfortable believing in them and that everyone else we know believes the same thing and are happy?
What conclusions do you draw from this entire exercise?
Frank Breslin is a retired high-school teacher in the New Jersey public school system, where he taught English, Latin, German, and History for forty years.
