The Academic Approach®

“We of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits without the fatigue of reading or thinking.” Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1704

Teaching students to think critically seems to be an educational goal that is as broadly demanded and as it is frequently unfulfilled. Generally speaking, all of the parties involved in the ongoing discussion of critical thinking agree that, when acquired, it enables students to thoughtfully weigh evidence, entertain both sides of an issue, advance an argument through substantiated claims, arrive at conclusions through deduction and inference, solve multi-step problems, and so on. Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, critical thinking is

generally perceived to be a teachable skills set that is widely considered an essential component of a well-designed curriculum. Given this perception, parents demand that these skills be taught in school, business leaders insist that the future of our economy depends upon them, and educators promise that they will convey them in the classroom.

There is nothing new about the intense interest in the teaching of critical thinking skills. The initial catalyst was the 1983 study by the National Commission on Excellence in Education entitled A Nation At Risk which found that many seventeen-year-olds so lacked in “‘higher-order’ intellectual skills” that nearly four in ten could not draw inferences from written material and that only two in ten could write a persuasive essay. Indeed, for the past twenty-five years, considerable resources have been dedicated to programs designed to teach critical thinking. Despite all of the attention and resources devoted to these ‘higher-order’ intellectual skills, little progress seems to have been made and the calls for the effective teaching of critical skills in our schools continue unabated.

As an educator who has tried to teach critical thinking within the context of both independent high school and university literature programs, it seems reasonable to pose the question whether or not it is possible to teach critical thinking. This question has been raised and pondered by Daniel T. Willingham in his column in American Educator. Having surveyed numerous studies of the effectivity of various approaches to teaching critical thinking, Willingham makes the point that a crucial flaw in the pedagogical discussion about teaching critical thinking has been the assumption that critical thinking is a skill, like riding a bicycle, that can be learned and then applied in any situation. Drawing upon his two decades worth of research in the field, Willingham argues that critical thinking is not that kind of skill but, instead, is a way of thinking that is inextricably bound together with the content of thought.

Accordingly, if a teacher repeatedly urges students to consider a topic from a number of perspectives, they will learn that it is important to do so; but, if the students do not possess a broad-enough knowledge of the topic, they cannot possibly think about it from a number of perspectives. Willingham asserts: “You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advise they memorize… it makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content.” He concludes that effective approaches to teaching critical thinking are grounded in “building complex, integrated knowledge bases.”

A student who can speak critically about a topic in literature or history or science is necessarily a student who has developed over time a broad-enough foundation in the subject area to examine it from multiple perspectives, that is, to approach it as a critical thinker. There is no quick quick and easy path to learning critical thinking skills; there is no substitute for the hard work of immersion in a discipline. In order to yield critical thinking, an academic approach to any subject area requires thoughtful and painstaking study in a subject area.

Academic Approach