LiberalArtsOnline Volume 3, Number 10
November 2003
We bring you what is a novelty for us, in this number of LiberalArtsOnline: a double feature. In two quite different ways, these essays by Brian Bodenbender and Richard Lynch are about the process of gaining perspective through a liberal arts education. The idea has grown on us lately that with this newsletter we should practice what we preach so often to students, that the capacity to consider multiple perspectives is a key attribute of the well-educated mind. We have plans for future double features on "know thyself" and on linkages between liberal arts education and preparation for work in the professions. Please let us know of topics that are on your mind for which a double feature might be the optimal sort of treatment.
--The Editors
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Facing the About: Why Disciplines are Essential to the Liberal Arts
by Brian Bodenbender
Associate Professor of Geological and Environmental Sciences
Hope College, Holland, MI.
Two trends are pushing professors not to teach their subjects but instead to teach about them. The first trend is that interdisciplinary courses have spread from an appropriate place among advanced offerings to introductory levels in the curriculum, resulting in courses like "Cultural Heritage" and "Humans and the Environment." These courses can't cover the fundamental elements of any one discipline, so they necessarily focus on teaching "about" various relevant disciplines. The second trend is that teaching "about" is emerging in content-lean disciplinary courses designed specifically for non-majors. For instance, one response to the intensely science-phobic student who maintains a core identity as "not a science person" is to offer trimmed-down, specially-labeled general education courses.
An axiom of the interdisciplinary movement is that disciplines are artificial constructs shaped by the vagaries of humanity's fumbling search for knowledge. However, while disciplines certainly are historical entities, they are more than historical accidents. Disciplines provide (1) a characteristic approach to problems; (2) a commonality of background, experience, and language; and (3) an identity as part of a community of scholars. Critics of the disciplinary approach can dismiss the first two elements as problematic, claiming that they canalize thinking and erect artificial barriers to communication and cooperation across disciplines. However, the third element, developing identity within a scholarly community, is mission-critical for the liberal arts.
The fundamental purpose of a liberal arts education is not to apprentice students in a discipline. Rather, it is to transform students. The liberal arts catchphrase, "equipping students to lead examined lives," implies this transformation, wherein students recognize their own formative biases and then work out which ones to embrace and which ones to discard. A liberal arts education catalyzes transformation by immersing students in a variety of perspectives, opening their eyes to a multiplicity of ways to see the world.
Teaching "about" a discipline, instead of immersing students in the discipline, delays the formation of identity for potential majors, but a far more serious problem is that it gives general education students permission to distance themselves from the subject and conveniently avoid a challenge to their preconceived self-identity. A humanities student who enjoys a general education course about biology or an interdisciplinary course about science is fundamentally different from one who finds herself excelling in introductory biology for majors. The former is enriched but essentially untouched; the latter must confront a question of identity.
The irony of the interdisciplinary trend is that the liberal arts have always been interdisciplinary at heart, even in programs that offer only disciplinary courses. Ideally, robust introductions to diverse disciplines with distinctive languages and unique perspectives should enable liberal arts students to move between fields, so that they can simultaneously test like an artist, know like a historian, and infer like a geologist. Not everyone will be an artist, historian, or geologist, but without immersions that let students experience how practitioners in these fields think, see, and analyze the world we deny students the challenge to self-concept that prompts them to reshape and solidify their identity--the transformation that constitutes the primary value of a liberal arts education.
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Direct personal responses to Brian Bodenbender at bodenbender@hope.edu.
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Rethinking Critical Thinking: Values and Attitudes
by Richard A. Lynch
Research Fellow
Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts
Wabash College, Crawfordsville, IN.
"What is the mark of a liberally educated person?" Many of the answers to this question converge upon the common theme of critical thinking. One study of liberal arts education by Winter, McClelland and Stewart notes that "Critical thinking is perhaps the most general term for the intellectual abilities that are supposed to be characteristic of the liberally educated person."(1) The problem, however, is that the term "critical thinking"--like "liberal education" itself--is understood to mean a wide variety of closely related things. Winter, McClelland and Stewart have analyzed different uses of the term in higher education literature. They identify seven distinct qualities that writers on the topic have characterized as "critical thinking." The qualities include "differentiation and discrimination within a broad range of particular phenomena" and "articulation and communication of abstract concepts." The seven qualities cluster around what Winter, McClelland and Stewart describe as "the skill of advanced concept formation" (pp. 12, 27). A more recent study employs a "minimalist" concept of critical thinking: "The critical thinking tradition seeks ways of understanding the mind and then training the intellect so that such 'errors', 'blunders', and 'distortions' of thought are minimized.... [T]hose who think critically characteristically strive for such intellectual ends as clarity, precision, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth, and logicalness (2)."
Something is lost when critical thinking--which we so often claim as one of the most important things students should learn--becomes reduced to these kinds of cognitive functions. Indeed, they are merely logical functions, a narrowness reflected in the fact that most university courses on "critical thinking" are courses in informal logic. This situation is unfortunate because, despite the tendency to reduce critical thinking to such a lowest common denominator, the term and the activity behind it are rich and provocative.
Critical thinking is much more than the ability to recognize a fallacy when you see one. The hardest parts of defining critical thinking are moving beyond this statement of absence and spelling out what that "much more" is. By recognizing two important aspects of a fuller understanding of critical thinking, we can improve the ways we approach our teaching. Good critical thinking is not value-neutral, nor is it merely instrumental. It is intimately connected with a) values and b) attitudes.
Critical thinking presupposes values at the heart of its activity. How can one make a good judgment or assessment of virtually any problems and dilemmas, without an evaluative basis for that decision? Good critical thinking does not just accept a set of values "uncritically." It challenges and reevaluates the very values that it takes as its basis for judgment. One important component of critical thinking, then, is some understanding of one's starting points--who one is, what one believes, and why. Critical thinking is thus both reflective and evaluative. It raises the possibility of both the critical thinker and her milieu being challenged, unsettled, and perhaps changed.
This reflexive, potentially disruptive, feature reveals how critical thinking is intimately connected with attitudes. For Immanuel Kant, "Enlightenment," or "emergence from a self-incurred immaturity," meant the willingness to think for oneself, to think critically (3). Such a willingness is an attitude that opens beliefs and ideas up to challenge. At the most fundamental level, good critical thinking entails an attitude of reflective openness and challenge. It supposes a genuine willingness to consider new perspectives, to try to understand them from within, and to step outside of one's own views long enough to acknowledge that one's perspectives, assumptions, and outlook are vulnerable, perhaps even mistaken or incomplete. A critical thinker is willing to turn that criticism upon both these new approaches and herself. She is willing to change what she is doing or what she believes in light of these critical insights. This core attitude may be what makes critical thinking "critical." Without it, critical thinking becomes a hollow shell, a mere analytic tool applied to externally determined ends.
Warren Nord offers a compelling redefinition of critical thinking. His redefinition moves the concept closer to these deepening relationships with values and attitudes. "Critical thinking is not just a matter of applying the rules of logic (much less scientific method)," Nord writes. "It is a matter of thinking and feeling empathetically with others, of engaging one's imagination, of having access to a wealth of facts about the possible effects of alternative actions, of discerning patterns of meaning in experience, of looking at the world from different perspectives (4)." Scientific method and logical reasoning are good examples of critical thinking, and they are important aspects of it, but in themselves they are not adequate accounts of critical thinking. That is because the ways we use them can be rote and unreflective, not really open to alternatives and differences. For students to develop as truly critical thinkers, they must be willing to reflect upon and articulate their own starting beliefs and assumptions, whether these are scientific, moral, cultural, or otherwise. They must be genuinely open to other approaches or worldviews, open to new ways of understanding the ideas they have taken for granted. Then they must carefully consider the consequences of this reflection.
Here is an example from my own teaching. In a course on "Utopias," I challenge students to pay careful attention to their own responses to various utopian visions, as well as to the values behind those visions. In this way I challenge the students to discover and articulate their own values, which come into focus through engagement with the utopian visions. Now the students are in a position to critically assess their own values, to explore carefully their agreements and disagreements with each utopian vision, and to articulate reasons for and against their own views. Through this process they gain a wider perspective on their own values, realize much more nuanced responses to the utopias, and sometimes change their values. The students are developing as critical thinkers.
Critical thinking is not merely a logical exercise. It is a practice richly imbued with a set of values and attitudes. Nord notes that, "Of course, all of this makes critical moral thinking difficult and controversial." It also underscores the need to begin rethinking, and deepening, the ways in which we teach "critical thinking." We should not be content to teach logical reasoning skills. We must also work to encourage our students to develop self-reflective, challenging, and open attitudes. Help in developing these attitudes ought not be the sole province of "critical thinking" courses. It should be an aim of courses throughout the undergraduate curriculum.
We must not confuse teaching attitudes in this way with indoctrination. We will not be telling our students that they must subscribe to any particular outcome or belief. Instead, we will help them to develop a full set of tools for drawing their own conclusions. We will assist them in putting their own thinking in that light that Kant called "Enlightenment." The task may be difficult and controversial, but in a diverse and complex society, it is essential.
Endnotes:
(1) D. Winter, D. McClelland, and A. Stewart, A New Case for the Liberal Arts (Jossey-Bass, 1981), p. 27
(2) R. Paul, L. Elder, T. Bartell, " Study of 38 Public Universities and 28 Private Universities To Determine Faculty Emphasis on Critical Thinking In Instruction: Executive Summary" http://www.criticalthinking.org/resources/articles/research-findings-policy-recom.shtml
(3) I. Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" (1784)
(4) W. Nord, Religion & American Education (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 346.
An earlier version of this essay appeared in Tomorrow's Professor, no. 510 (September 18, 2003).
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LiberalArtsOnline is an occasional email essay on the liberal arts, provided as a public service of the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts.
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The comments published in LiberalArtsOnline reflect the opinions of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Center of Inquiry or Wabash College. Comments may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author(s), LiberalArtsOnline, and the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.