As this is a blog on being a Critical Thinker, let me start elaborating what I mean by this term. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I am posting one of my own articles on the topic, which was first published by The Assam Tribune, May 24 2013, titled, The Skill of Thinking.
Systematically organizing one's
thinking is the first and most crucial step in thinking better. This is something that can be easily taught
and learned.
For the last fifteen years, I have been teaching the skill
of Thinking. I can just hear you, my
reader, say, “Thinking? Why do you need to teach thinking”? Why indeed?
Thinking is an activity innate in human beings, like eating. What is there to be taught about
thinking?
A child who instinctively knows how to eat, needs to be
taught the systematics of eating --- what to eat and what not to, how to eat
what, protocols of eating and so on.
Similarly, our capacity to think needs systematic honing to make us
effective and productive thinkers.
Thinking is so much a part of us, that we do it
automatically. Just as we are not aware
of when we first started eating, we are also not aware of when we first started
to think. Again, just like our food
habits, without our knowledge, our thinking too gets influenced by our
surroundings, our culture, our authority figures, our peers, our media and our
experiences. We start developing our own world view by looking at the world
through the lenses provided by our societies' views, without our ever realizing
it. This is a part of what is called
socialization in anthropology and sociology --- the unconscious process by
which we learn our own culture. As we
get socialized into a society, we also imbibe its way of thinking, which then
becomes second nature to us. It is
because of this process that anything that is alien to our way of thinking
seems unimaginable. For example, in its
Edible Insect Program, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations has been endorsing eating insects as the new environmentally
friendly and nutritious weapon to fight hunger.
But how easy will it be to implement it is another question. In many
world views, including ours, eating insects is disgusting. For most of us, chomping into a grasshopper or a cricket, no
matter how tasty or it is supposed to be, is unthinkable.
Everything we think
and believe comes to us through the prism of our world view. Hence anything
that is outside our world view seems to be wrong, and things that come within
that view seems to be the right thing to do.
Our world view also determines our perspective on things. Our thoughts, opinions, on an
issue come out of our perspective on the situation. Most of the time, our
perspective is so taken-for-granted and ingrained in us that we are not even
aware of it. It becomes the only real
way to understand a situation. We are not even aware of how we think and the
basis of the decisions that we make.
Most
of the time, our thinking is uncritical; we take whatever we see and hear
around us at face value, interpreted through the perspective provided by our
world view. We often act on the
unconscious assumption that only one view is right. This is not generally the case --- each view
comes from a particular perspective of looking at an issue. Each of these perspectives come out of
beliefs, values, agendas and interests. We just need to look at any
controversial point being debated in the media to see that each issue will have
multiple perspectives on it. However, we
cannot also assume each of these views are correct. Thinking skills provides us with the tools to
critically evaluate these myriad perspectives and glean our our own
balanced opinion from them.
The
word critical often has a negative connotation.
In the context of thinking skills, this is not necessarily so. A critical thinker is someone who is able to
use his or her own thinking process to clarify ideas, solve problems, make
informed decisions and communicate ideas.
Though we are born with the power to think, our innate thinking
capability needs to be channelized into thinking reasonably, logically and
systematically. Critical Thinking, which
constitute a key dimension of thinking skills, provide the techniques by which
we can heighten our innate capacity to think, and sharpen the skills that we
already have. The first step in doing
this is to question our own thinking, identify our world view and dig into the
roots of how we know what we know. This
is a skill that is very easily taught. It enable us to identify the biases,
prejudices, assumptions that any world view, including our own, can have.
These skills are needed in whatever we do, no matter what
stage of life we are at. These skills
help students study better and more efficiently, connect textbook material to
the professional world, and communicate effectively. These are skills tested in many college
entrance tests. For professionals and others, these skills enable deeper
analysis and understanding of facts and information as well as convey one's
ideas convincingly. This in turn brings
in better problem solving, decision
making and inter-personal well being, among other things.
