Against critical thinking pedagogy

Abstract

Critical thinking pedagogy is misguided. Ostensibly a cure for narrowness of thought, by using the emotions appropriate to conflict, it names only one mode of relation to material among many others. Ostensibly a cure for fallacies, critical thinking tends to dishonesty in practice because it habitually leaps to premature ideas of what the object or student is asserting. Most importantly, critical thinking pedagogy assumes that students start out with thick beliefs and should become thinner. But in an age of default skepticism such as ours, it reinforces the vague belief that no beliefs are true and presses students toward an even thinner condition. What is needed instead is a pedagogy that thinks toward belief. This pedagogy would be marked by: (1) interpretive charity; (2) tolerance for a specific kind of exploratory bullshit; (3) the exercise of the imagination.