Buzzwords swarm around the topic of educational reform, and one of the buzziest is "critical thinking."
It's one of those great-sounding ideas that goes astray somewhere between theory and practice. Who would want to be against teaching children to reason logically, to assess evidence, to examine their assumptions? Who ever was?
But implementing the idea is another matter entirely. California's Department of Education spent years and millions dreaming up an examination that was supposed to foster critical thinking, and brought forth instead the notorious CLAS test, the California Learning Assessment System, which did nothing of the sort.
CLAS itself is dead, but the same people who thought it up are still in charge. Something equally disagreeable is likely to rise from its grave.
Proponents of critical thinking say that schools should expect more of children than just "rote memorization." I used to be a mathematician, so you'll get no argument about that from me, although I have noticed that people who don't have much use for facts invariably refer to knowing them as "rote" memorization.
It hasn't been my observation that the products of the American education industry suffer unduly from an excess of factual knowledge. Perhaps it's true that they know so little because their education has consisted of memorizing unrelated facts that they forget as soon as their examinations are over. But the adolescent mind seems to have an unlimited capacity for sports statistics and celebrity trivia, and even much younger children can astonish adults with their extensive and detailed knowledge of dinosaurs or some other some favorite topic.
It seems a lot more plausible that no one has ever expected them to know very much. It's bad for self-esteem for students to fail tests requiring knowledge. But everybody has feelings, and there's no way to mark them wrong, so students are allowed to substitute uninformed opinion and personal experience for actual information and reasoned judgment. That's what happened to CLAS.
But it's not what critical thinking ought to be about, says Richard Paul, who has been fighting these battles for a long time. Paul is the director of the Center for Critical Thinking, which held its 15th International Conference at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, Calif., starting July 30.
About 800 people attended this year's conference, Paul said. That's sharply down from earlier years, especially among California teachers, and he attributes the drop in part to his outspoken opposition to the CLAS test.
"And I'll do it again if I have to," he said.
In his keynote speech, Paul reminded his audience that critical thinking is one of the crucial national goals included in the federal education bill, Goals 2000.
"That means programs with 'critical thinking' in the title are salable," Paul said, "There's money to be made."
Nobody, it seems, wants to be left behind when a bandwagon starts rolling.
"A lot of teachers say they're fostering critical thinking," said Neil Browne, an economist and lawyer who teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, "but in fact they take critical thinking as a label for whatever they do."
Another conference-goer, an educational consultant, said teachers tell him their principals and superintendents want them to go to conferences because "Everybody else is doing this, they ask me about my district, and I'm looking bad."
That makes it all sound merely vogueish, yet the essentials of critical thinking ought not to be controversial at all.
Paul makes that point with a joke. "Suppose someone said to me 'You're a fine critical thinker, Richard, except that you're unclear, inaccurate, vague, irrelevant, shallow, narrow and illogical . . . other than that, you're doing fine.' "
There are, or there should be, universal intellectual standards to assess critical thinking: It should display clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth and logic. Hard to achieve, of course, and requiring diligent practice and constant attention, but not really debatable.
So why is there resistance? Some of it, supposedly, comes from teachers who see it as just one more thing they're expected to do: "I'd like to foster critical thinking, but I have too much content to cover."
Some of it supposedly, comes from parents who do not want their children taught to question authority.
Both of those, I think, are caricatures with possibly a small kernel of truth. Teachers do have a great deal to cover, but it surely must be easier to teach students who reason clearly, and more efficient, too, because they are less likely to forget material they thoroughly understand. Parents don't want rebellious or undisciplined children, but clear thinking is not automatically revolutionary. It's usually a sign of maturity when children begin to accept "Here's why" as a substitute for "Because I said so."
The question that really interests me is why this whole expensive enterprise is necessary — the conferences, the textbooks, the workshops, the consultants, the continuing education courses and the additional training, all to help teachers learn how to think critically themselves and to impart that skill to their students.
The theory is that students will learn more effectively, and remember more of what they are taught, if they are also taught to be critical thinkers. That makes sense. So why don't teachers learn it when they are studying to be teachers?