Part 1 – Do we Teach Critical Thinking To School Learners Effectively?

By Bongani Frank Masilela (Chief Executive of Tshimong Education)

13 February 2020

The year is 1910 and American psychologist and philosopher John Dewey who had been championing the need for reform in the American education system, coined the term “Critical Thinking” or “Reflective Thinking” as he would sometimes refer to it. Dewey defined this type of thinking as an “active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends (Dewey, 1910). His description was quite apt, and it speaks to a concern that was the bane of many educational reformers of the early 20th century (despite people thinking it is a recent phenomenon).

Fast forward 104 years later and you get a desolate and curious 19-year old traversing the grounds of the University of the Witwatersrand during “Orientation Week”, a jam-packed beer-spouting festival of budding intellectual curiosity and university debauchery. The first person to snatch me and sign me up to a club/society was the man who would later become my business partner, he signed me up to the “Wits Debating Union”. I had never done competitive debate before and for me, the idea of spending varsity holidays travelling to another country instead of slaving away at my part-time job as a receptionist at a hair salon, or hanging around nerds from all faculties on Thursday night instead of exploring the Johannesburg party scene was exactly what I wanted. So I signed up and gave them my money!

It was not the trophies that I prized as much as I did the travel, networking and most importantly the life-long skills that got me through undergrad. It was the fact that using the critical thinking skills I had exercised over a 4-year period, no concept flew over my head in a lecture and in fact, whatever residual critical thinking I did that my snooty academic self could not use in the lecture hall, I used in entrepreneurship when we established this company in the final year of our undergrad. It was being exposed to commerce, engineering and even medicine students in that environment, most of whom were cum laude candidates with full post-grad bursaries to study both locally and abroad, that made me realise that the 5Cs when taught to students well enough, enhance one’s academic proficiency and also sets them apart when doing interviews or being tasked with conducting and leading major projects in the workplace.

When you spend 3/4 years doing 8 tournaments a year, being given 15 minutes to prepare a 7-minute speech on topics varying from economics, health care, ethics, law, governance, technology, the environment and education, you tend to develop a knack for “reflective thought” or “critical thinking” as we now refer to it. You challenge your biases and the linear thinking patterns that were taught to you in an education system that was meant to teach you rote learning. What we learned in our own work in Tshimong was that school learners were now able to apply themselves a lot better in the classroom, as per their teachers’ feedback, after doing these programmes. The skills that they acquired and the way they went about acquiring these skills meant that they could comprehend new concepts and ideas a lot easier across subject areas.

A study done by Indiana University in 2008 (Cooney, et al., 2008) found that engineering students were some of the least likely to know what critical thinking is, let alone know how to apply it. They sought to introduce a number of curriculum and assessment reforms to ensure that engineering students were a lot more critical in the way they applied their knowledge and comprehension of content. This included design exercises that were coupled with considerations of how some engineering projects affect local communities and how these projects can be carried out in a sustainable manner (more on this in Part 3 of the article series). This is particularly important for engineers, some of whom either work in saturated markets or those who will see greater competition from computers that are able to complete some of their more mundane tasks more efficiently. Critical thinking is what will set them apart from machines and even some of their more gifted and well-rounded colleagues who display better thinking strategies.

Of the 3500 school learners that we have worked with over the last 4 years, we have encountered aspiring doctors, entrepreneurs, engineers, lawyers and lab technicians. All of them had the same concern – that being how we prepare them for a world in which critical thinking will prove to be more important for their prospects than will their transcript data. What this meant was that we needed to find universal and scalable techniques for teaching this skill across all of those different environments and aspirations. What some of our programmes helped learners to do, particularly those that we conducted with ABSA, was to better select university courses that they were to study as well as how to make sure that the skills they had learned can still apply in the 4th Industrial Revolution. No teacher, parent or school principal will be in the room that their children will be in when they are pitching for funding for their businesses and are being asked difficult questions on the spot, same as with job interviews or work projects where colleagues and employers are constantly challenging us to think better. In fact, none of the knowledge that we make learners memorise as things stand will serve them well in a workplace and academy that is no longer static over a generation, but experiences disruptions every year.

Critical thinking and programmes related to teaching it to offer school learners an adaptive skill that will see them through a century of threats and opportunities, whilst being relevant after every disruption. Knowledge simply cannot be relevant across ages, or more commonly these days, across years, however, our ability to manipulate it, comprehend it and use to produce new knowledge, is what will see us and the children that follow us, being able to survive this century. In fact, it has always been the case that critical thinking would be relevant across centuries. The mere fact that one theory initiated by John Dewey 110 years ago is still proving to be the key to surviving drastic changes in education, says something.

The next article in the series will be “Part 2 – Problem-solving”. The articles in this series follow a sequence and will be published every Thursday.

Bibliography

Dewey, J., 1910. How We Think. Boston: DC Heath.

Cooney, E., Alfrey, K. & Owens, S., 2008. CRITICAL THINKING IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION: American Society for Engineering Education, AC 2008(1110), pp. 13.344.1 - 13.344.16.

 Delve much deeper into the relationship between debating and critical thinking. Explain the science and unpack how Tshimong saw an opportunity for kids.