With an encroaching world of fake news and disinformation, critical thinking has taken the center stage. We hear about how it is oftentimes absent across the education spectrum, and come to terms with how sometimes we can fall prey to rushed and ill-formed conclusions.

With that in mind, it is no wonder that critical thinking became a sought after skill for intelectual and creative labour.

It is also no wonder that a never-ending flurry of critical thinking courses appeared, ready to teach a new generation of workers and executives on the intricacies of well-structured and inquisitive thinking.

It is also no wonder that you might be wondering whether critical thinking can be taught. I certainly was.

So I started reading on the topic. Researching. Matching claims to sources. Checking whether what some people say is confirmed by what we know.

In other words, thinking critically about the topic.

But what I found is that this way of critical thinking is, in essence, scientific thinking. In fact, critical thinking, as a general skill, is not really something you can teach - critical thinking skills learned on a subject are remarkably hard to transfer to other fields.

Why? Thinking critically about something requires knowledge on the topic - it requires you to be able to tell what is and isn’t likely, what are the reasonable sources, how research is performed in this field. There are some standard “meta-strategies”: check if the sources are reliable, whether your conclusions are rushed or overconfident, whether you might be ignoring evidence to suit your conclusions, etc. They all require knowledge on the topic.

Daniel Willingham is an oftentimes cited expert on the topic. His belief is that critical thinking can be taught. It can be taught within subjects, along the years. He defends a pedagogy of critical thinking that spans courses and ages. This comprehensive way of teaching critical thinking stems from a crucial observation: critical thinking can be taught, but not as a skill. In other words: there is critical thinking within subject matters, but there is not a general critical thinking skill which can be applied transversally.

The literature closely aligns with this - while there are tools which can be broadly applied, people have a hard time transferring them to new fields and topics. Two situations in particular can lead to a more systematic skill transfer: i) when people become very familiar with the structure of specific problems they have an easier time transferring that structure to other problems and ii) when people are told that a new problem is analogous to an older problem they had to solve. And even when you understand you should transfer skills from one problem to another, you still require the knowledge allowing you to do so.

Having said this, I am not surprised people assume critical thinking can be taught as a general skill. The popular tropes we have for engineers and tech founders thinking they can “solve” everything through abstraction (the engineer syndrome), and for economists trying to model everything by getting rid of anything that’s hard to quantify (the “Ricardian vice” as Schumpeter puts it) allude to this. People are enamored with the concept of multidisciplinary approaches, but they don’t want to pay for the people implementing them. Anything promising a broadly applicable and valuable solution will raise a lot of support. Maybe it should raise eyebrows instead.

In short:

  1. Critical thinking is remarkably complicated to teach as a general skill. Doing so apparently requires long-term solutions and a lot of practice
  2. The idea of the general critical thinker is remarkably appealing: small teams with the capacity to solve multiple problems are cheaper than larger teams with the same problem solving capabilities. However, reality does not bend to appeal or earnings calls
  3. There is a certain familiarity with problem structures that can help in transferring methods across fields. Fans of Pólya’s How to solve it (a really good book) will certainly smile and say “well, duh” after reading this. In fact, Pólya, as an educator, believed that it was practice and abstraction which could help students - and future mathematicians - solve increasingly complex problems. This allows people to learn or construct new heuristics for problem solving and understand when/where they can be applied. Of course that his method focuses on mathematics, so there is no guarantee that he would vouch for a general critical thinking skill
  4. We should be very wary of blindly transferring solutions from field A to field B without checking in with field B experts about the reasonability and relevance of that solution. A solution fixing a problem is one thing, a solution looking for a problem is entirely different. Tukey put it best: an approximate answer to the right problem is worth more than an exact answer to an approximate problem. Misinterpreting a field oftentimes leads to approximate problems whose solution will have no impact on the field.

Some final remarks: I don’t have anything against the project of teaching critical thinking: I think it’s a tremendously valuable skill and that it should be taught more consistently during compulsory education and across different subjects. However, I don’t see short-term courses on general critical thinking as something particularly valuable. The best case scenario: you get some neat strategies which will work in specific scenarios. And don’t get me wrong, that can be really helpful! But that’s not the same as developing actual critical thinking: that is cultivated over time through practice, reflection and deep knowledge on the fields where you want your critical thinking abilities to shine.

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