A few years ago, my university adopted a new general education curriculum. We moved from a distribution model that featured exposure to ideas in different categories (humanities, social sciences, sciences) to a model with defined learning outcomes for ten general education categories (scientific inquiry, mathematical reasoning, oral communication, etc.). We named this a competency model, which was definitely a mistake, but the change did help us focus on the notion that our students should develop particular skills and habits of mind as part of the general education experience.
Among those “competencies” was critical thinking. We had a lot of conversation around this one. As it turns out, every discipline wants to claim that they teach critical thinking. The agreed upon definition, which describes the evaluation of arguments, was twisted to fit into every possible version of critique. The word “argument” was stretched to include every aesthetic choice and there was a general claim that you cannot teach anything without doing critical thinking. Would that this were so.
In the face of this pandemic, it has become exceedingly clear that as a culture we have failed to teach critical thinking in any meaningful way. From the misunderstanding of the use of masks to the over-generalization of preliminary scientific investigations to the mistaken notion that this quarantine is designed to stop COVID-19 completely, we are awash in evidence that we do not know what evidence is. And don’t get me started on the idea of trusted sources. We have clearly lost our collective minds on that one. Higher education must remedy this immediately.
Here is where I think we went wrong. We do teach the basics of critical thinking, but we do not always connect those basics in humanities classes, to the hypothesis testing in science classes, or to the structure of probabilities in statistics. We also seem to be satisfied with the starting principles (often black and white/true or false constructs), and less committed to the complications of the gray areas.*
For example, most of our students have had an experience of science that involves hypothesis testing. This is good because hypothesis testing is the primary mechanism for moving knowledge forward in the sciences. It is an important method because it can yield both positive and negative results. To put it plainly, if there is no option to find your hypothesis wanting, you do not really have a hypothesis.
The trouble is our basic understanding of hypothesis testing often leads to the faulty idea that hypotheses yield true or false conclusions. This is rarely the case. They lead to conclusions that are more likely to be true or more likely to be false. A good research protocol continues to build on those likelihoods until there is enough evidence to propose an action or at least a reasonable working assumption. That leaves a lot of gray area, yes gray area is science.
Then there are the informal logic classes. These focus on the structure of arguments, and the incredibly important tool of the syllogism. You all remember a variation of this one:
- All human beings are mortal.
- Socrates is a human being.
- Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
It is such a simple and elegant tool. I remember when I first encountered it. It was as if I suddenly had the tools to defend myself from arguments that I had felt bullied into accepting. I went on to learn about manipulations of syllogisms, which abound in the world of politics and advertising, and the abuses of language that can mislead (weasel words), and I was properly empowered.
The trouble is most of our knowledge is not as simple as this construct allows. True and false are rarely the conclusions of an argument. More true and less true are the much more common realities. As much as I love the syllogism, it has a way of suggesting certainty where none exists.
Then there are our statistics classes. We have determined that statistics is foundational for many research programs (business, psychology, communication, and so on), because it is how ideas move forward in these disciplines. Basic understandings of T-Tests or Chi-Squares or ANOVAs are important tools for many career paths, and students who pay attention in these classes will develop their ability to use these tools. This is to the good. Unfortunately, we do not seem to be succeeding with the other important part of statistics–decoding and interpreting probabilities.
The person not tasked with doing statistics must still be able to interpret them. In all cases, what we are interpreting is the strength of the findings–the probability that we could get the same result with another, similar sample. Understanding how to determine the strength of a finding is so important to our lives, that I would call it an essential learning outcome. As we consider the barrage of “information” about COVID-19, essential learning becomes a matter of life and death.
Take the question of the effectiveness of face masks. Masks are a containment measure, but not an absolute one. They contain the spray we emit from our mouths and noses when talking, coughing, sneezing, etc. The argument for wearing them is to protect others from you in case you are an unknowing carrier of COVID-19. The argument is not that the masks will prevent all spread of COVID-19, but early studies suggest that it is a good tool in the effort to reduce the spread of this virus.
But wearing masks is not enough. We must use masks properly (cover nose and mouth). We must remember not to touch our faces, even if we are wearing a mask, because we may encounter droplets spread by someone else. We should probably stay 6 feet apart even with masks on (although, I think this argument is conflated with the typical spray range of 6 feet, and may be nullified by the wearing of masks), because that will remind us not to touch each other. If we are in a high risk category, we should probably continue to stay home.
In other words, it is not as simple as
- Wearing a mask will stop people from spreading COVID-19.
- Everyone is wearing a mask.
- Therefore, we will stop the spread of COVID-19.
The truth is more like
- Wearing a mask will help to limit the spread of COVID-19.
- Most people will wear a mask (I hope).
- Therefore, we will limit the spread of COVID-19.
What the second syllogism needs to help us all feel a little better is some well-supported testing results that yield some probabilities that we can be comfortable with. We are also going to need some points of comparison to help us live with results that are less than 100% perfect, because 100% effective is never a result of anything. We are going to need reminders of the things we already do that are not 100% safe and those statistics need to be calibrated to reasonableness (please do not give us car accidents).
We need to understand the connection between probabilities and hypotheses and/or syllogisms, and the realities of the vast gray areas in which we live. That is the only way we will be able to move out of our quarantined world. Critical thinking is the best tool we have for navigating the gray areas in which we live. Higher education must address this habit of mind directly and often because our lives are at stake. To ignore this urgent need would be a dereliction of duty.
*Apologies for the simplification of logic, hypothesis testing, and probabilities. This is an essay. We all need to full courses.
