Christopher Bauer’s Weblog

Greetings,

In reading our Burbules article for this week, I would have to say that it was impressive in its analysis over these two concepts, although I have to admit that my formal education in this area has been lacking.

As many of you who have read my other articles may know, I think that a major purpose of schools is to produce good, critically thinking citizens who will find it necessary to take it upon themselves to ameliorate or eliminate society’s ills.  Thus, when Burbules, on page 49, discussed how, or even if, critical thinking can be generalized across subject matters, I was intrigued.  The example that Burbules gives to illustrate that point is a scientific critical thinker versus a historian critical thinker.  When they evaluates “good evidence,” are they thinking about problems in similar ways, or are the differences in interpretation and application dominant?

I would be hard-pressed to state that given a problem, they would approach it in the same manner, aside from the most general of ways.  In my own experiences with history and science, I know that one of the first things a historian does is to examine not what is written, but rather who has written it and why.  I would trust that a scientist would perform a similar check before reading an experiment.  How they do this analysis, I would assume, would be different however.  Both would examine the credibility of the author and then examine the evidence that the author has brought to the community.  As opposed to a historian, I doubt that a scientist has much to worry about bias.

Thus, in my opinion, there are distinct differences of what each type of issues that the critical thinker must determine.  However, the similarities are still there (although I admit that I glossed over that) and can be taught.  In order to create critical thinkers, we, as teachers, must instruct students on how to think for themselves, and to distrust those who seem to give information freely, because there is “No Free Lunch” and those who do so usually have a bias or a hidden agenda.  By doing this, we can hope that our students, when they become adults, will think before they act, and thus will be more resistant to the lure of demagogues who will try to lead America down the path of destruction.

Work Sited:

Burbules, N. C., & Berk, R. (1999). Critical thinking and critical pedagogy: Relations, differences and limits. In T. S. Popkewitz, T. S., & L. Fendler (Eds.) Critical theories in education: Changing terrains of knowledge and politics (pp. 45-65). New York: Routledge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 at 10:39 am and is filed under Class Readings and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.