Anthony C. Alessandrini

Department of English

Kingsborough Community College-City

  University of New York

2001 Oriental Boulevard

Brooklyn, NY 11235

01-718-413-6056

tonyalessandrini@yahoo.com  

Against Critical Thinking

Abstract:

One of the guiding questions of this panel asks how “changing cultural, theoretical, and institutional practices and policies” might affect critical exchange in academe. In this paper, I will argue against the one theoretical approach (although it no longer has to present itself as such, since it has reached the status of institutional common sense) that undergirds many, if not most, institutional practices and policies throughout academe and that has come to seriously attenuate the potential for critical exchange: that of “Critical Thinking.” Obviously, I will not be taking up a position against the practice of thinking critically, which is of course a basic and fundamental part of all intellectual work. What I will be arguing is that “Critical Thinking,” writ large, has become the explicit or implicit rationale for almost all of the activity performed by humanities departments at colleges and universities (especially “non-elite” institutions) in the United States. It would be difficult to find a departmental mission statement or a president’s report that doesn’t extol the importance of teaching students “critical thinking” skills. As such, it risks becoming a meaningless term: if everything that we do counts as a form of critical thinking, then what happens to the true sense of “critical exchange” whose state of being is the focus this session? The theoretical framework of Critical Thinking is one of opening up everything to the potential for critical inquiry (albeit inquiry of a particular and attenuated sort) except for the very framework of Critical Thinking itself. The hegemony of Critical Thinking extends beyond institutions of higher learning: even the military, as I will argue, has introduced this notion of imbuing its recruits with “critical thinking” skills as part of its stated mission. It also has international repercussions: as Saba Mahmood has shown, one of the arguments made by the State Department and by institutions such as the Rand Corporation to support the violent “importation” of democracy via military intervention (in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example) is the need to inculcate in the citizens of these countries (including its intellectuals) “the basic requirements of a modern democratic mind-set,” including those terms so dear to contemporary academe: “critical thinking and creative problem solving” (the quote is from a Rand Corporation report used to justify the Bush Administration’s “Muslim World Outreach” program, launched in 2003, the same year as the invasion of Iraq). So there is much at stake in taking up a position against Critical Thinking, including the attempt to foster a truer and more robust form of critical exchange in academe, and to imagine a form of critical thought and exchange that might allow the academy to more effectively intervene in the public sphere today. My theoretical framework for this paper will come from Adorno’s distinction between “pseudo-erudition” and truly critical thinking; I will argue that Critical Thinking, as it has developed as an institutional practice, is much closer to the former than the latter.