Critically Creative
While writing this article and recording the associated podcast, I had in mind teachers: they are my primary “target audience” so to speak. But this will, I hope be useful for anyone with a “stake” in the education system: so of course students, their parents, university lecturers, administrators - people in a position to make decisions about schools and curriculum. The topic is essentially “Critical Thinking” and what I think it is, in the Popperian tradition. As I will mention, unlike even just 15 years ago, “Critical Thinking” is now a fashionable term thrown around in schools, universities and among those charged with deciding what students are taught and how. Often “Creative Thinking” is thrown into the mix as well. All sorts of activities are devised for students to improve these “skills”: sometimes entire new subjects are created for students to take that are supposed to be about improving “critical thinking”. It’s all - from the education system’s point of view - very new. And because it’s new *there* they are, largely speaking, inventing things on the fly or designating certain techniques or rules or activities “critical and creative thinking”. It really is all the buzz in many places.
As it is usually crafted, the lofty aim is to provide students with the skills to evaluate and assess claims being made - typically in the news or in history or something like that - and decide whether and to what extent the claim is valid. My present concern here is to summarise some of the already existing philosophy and epistemology content that exists in the tradition known as “critical rationalism” such that it might be useful for anyone in education and expected to teach about or learn “critical thinking” - precisely because there really is a “best explanation” already there of “critical thinking” laid down by philosophers (chiefly Karl Popper) which has failed to explicitly inform what is merely called “critical thinking” in education circles. I regard this as bizarre but not surprising (given the way the academic culture tends to treat the work of Karl Popper). So my aim here is to provide a very practical alternative to those other things labelled “critical thinking”. In doing this I traverse a fair bit of ground that at times might seem only orthogonally related to the ostensible topic of the piece. For example we get into narrow AI vs AGI and I speak about economic systems and some of the broader issues to do with coercion inside and outside of schools. I call the main part of this article “Critical and Creative Thinking 2.0” because I wrote a version of this around 6 years ago. Since then, much has transpired and some of it has affected the emphasis I am placing on certain things. That original article was quite long: this is longer still, which is one reason I have turned it into a podcast. Anyone who wants can listen at 2.0x speed or faster. Again, I hope this is of practical use to anyone with a student in their lives: teachers, parents, administrators and, of course, the students themselves.
Links to the podcast on:
Youtube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Podbean
Luminary
Critical and Creative Thinking 2.0
This episode, something of a hobby horse of mine. And the reason it is, is because I have worked in education and I have worked in what’s called “curriculum development”. One issue as every teacher knows is that:
Every politician, parent, scientist and “stakeholder” has an opinion about what should be in a school curriculum. Health advocates say nutrition and exercise science. Scientists want more science, psychologists say common cognitive biases, programmers say more coding, conservatives want more civics, finance and economics, socialists push for more gender, race and sexuality studies, philosophers/"critical thinking" gurus say logic and reasoning fallacies; everyone debates the content of history, whether and to what extent religion is taught, half of the mathematicians will say more algebra, the other half will say more calculus and the other half will say more statistics….(yes, I was joking there).
Anyways all the coercion aside, the indoctrination aside and in places like Australia the compulsory nature of everything in the schooling system aside - given this whole unholy system is not going anywhere anytime soon no matter what many of us say about it - it’s worth looking at what could have worked. Or more optimistically: what could work to the extent it can work - even in places where everything is compulsory or coerced.
After all, if school students are getting more calculus when they should be getting statistics, or if they are getting a terribly anti-Western view from history and a science curriculum polluted by politics and activism and pessimism about tomorrow - maybe there is something like so-called “intellectual self defence” to be found in more basic skills? Something like critical and creative thinking skills?
Well it’s actually all the rage right now in education, let me tell you. It’s very fashionable (but then so is almost all the content of the curriculum in schools and universities: it runs on trends and fashions rather too often in too many departments). Most jurisdictions across Australia, the USA, those in the British tradition, in global institutions like the International Baccalaureate Office and of course in the universities now talk about how they teach critical thinking and creative thinking.
I’ve made videos about this before. Years ago. I’ve written about this before - multiple times. But years have passed and a lot has happened even over just the last 5 years. And so I’ve refined my views somewhat - though not entirely changed-the way I phrase things - the underlying ideas are exactly the same but I need to reemphasise some things that I thought, perhaps, went without saying. They don’t. I want to look - critically - at what some institutions describe critical thinking as and therefore why I think they’re wrong. So I’m going to tell you about what it typically is compared to what it could be. Not so much what should be taught in schools - I think that’s entirely the wrong question after all it should be about what someone wants to learn. But if you want to learn what critical thinking and what creative thinking is, I have some ideas here for you.
And also - and I know podcasters and lecturers and so on use this phrase a lot and it rarely ever rings true - the phrase is “People often ask me”. I’ve never had occasion to use it before. But here this really is, if not a question “people often ask me” it is the one I think I have been asked over the years most frequently. That question is - with regards to epistemology especially “What practical use is any of this exactly?”. And so I want to speak about that directly.
Critical and creative thinking amount to educational buzz words these days. I have written before about educational “buzz words” - and there is a real liability with their use. If you want to read about my aversion to such buzz words look up my article on learning (www.bretthall.org/learning). A problem with a buzzword of any kind is that a theorist - especially an educational theorist enamoured with neologisms can tend to co-opt already well defined concepts, redefine them and subject them to a certain species of what is called “lock-in”. Lock in is not a neologism by the way! Lock-in is where, unintentionally, a designed feature has some negative effect upon future potentials for growth. The polymath philosopher, scientist and technologist Jaron Lanier uses the example of the London Underground train system which lacks air-conditioning. Built at a time when air-conditioning was not possible on trains, now that it is, the tubes are simply not large enough for the exhaust required to accommodate air-conditioning systems on the trains and so, for now at least, passengers are locked-in to a hot and uncomfortable system most months of the year.
What has that to do with anything? Well as it can happen our there in the built environment - in train systems - so it can happen in institutions. So for example in education, sometimes, we can define into being some terminology that defines future directions in teaching and this constrains options for what might be learned, and how. For example: does calling certain activities "critical and creative thinking" lock-in how we might think (clearly!) about these ideas? I am now persuaded schools and universities have been headed down the wrong track on this for a while and so for anyone still working in those areas or, perhaps especially, the students in those places subject to these fads, should want to mentally pull the breaks and consider whether - metaphorically speaking - we might not want to widen the tunnel to accommodate some better ideas about what these terms mean.
Critical and creative thinking is the way knowledge is actually generated. As many who listen to this podcast regularly know - how knowledge is generated is the domain of a particular area of philosophy called “epistemology”. Epistemology is one of the most interesting, important and practical areas of philosophy and simultaneously one of the least well understood subjects we might dare say anywhere. People who know little about philosophy (and have little interest in it) can be dismissive of the whole project because they think it - philosophy - is largely concerned with existential naval gazing and it’s all about endless debates in moral philosophy (or ethics), or metaphysics and ontology (concerns about what "really" exists or what ultimately there is to know) or what the true meaning or definition of a particular word is and so ultimately the whole project of “doing philosophy” collapses into nothing more than a clash of mere matters of opinion. But this is false - and in fact it’s a really significant misconception because epistemology especially underlies how you think about everything else. It is the pre-eminent case of thinking - about thinking. And if your thinking is going wrong, then not only is your understanding of science possibly going wrong, and morality possibly going wrong and history possibly going wrong but your very own personal psychology may be possibly going wrong.
My own interests in philosophy have not generally been about ethics or metaphysics so often as about: how can we come to have deep knowledge of the world? And this is what epistemology is: it's literally "the theory of knowledge" (as it is defined in analytical philosophy). And in this area of philosophy there really is a best theory that we should strive to understand. (Not all of what is called "philosophy" is interesting - I agree on that much - and will admit much more later on. But much is worth preserving and trying to learn more about. Not least of which is epistemology as it's relevant to learning - the subject of this podcast and epistemology as it is currently best understood and how it applies to having an optimistic view of humanity and life. Oh, and the philosophy of science is absolutely crucial if you want to understand how scientific knowledge in particular grows. But I begin to digress...)
Returning to our definition of epistemology as "the theory of knowledge" we can rephrase it without any loss of meaning whatever to: epistemology is the explanation of the growth of knowledge. And this "growth of knowledge" can happen as a civilisation or it can happen inside a single mind of a learner. The processes, it turns out, are the same. Let me explain. There are two absolutely crucial aspects to the growth of knowledge: creativity and criticism.
In educational circles the terms “critical and creative thinking” have migrated away from how they have largely, and more precisely, been used in the more rarefied spheres where they have been genuine domains of study, controversy and progress over decades.
The terms now are synonymous not with thinking as such but rather certain teaching strategies that are more or less fashionable among some educators and educational theorists. Now I should add that there is a world of difference between a teaching strategy and a learning strategy as anyone involved in education should know, but in practise never seems to take seriously.
It is safe to say that almost all strategies used by teachers to teach students are the former (teaching strategies) - not the latter (actual learning strategies). Teaching strategies: which are typically ways of (usually coercively) organising schoolwork, or ideas on paper - ways of having students respond to questions or complete tasks - whether they move around a class, speak or not speak, draw pictures or write words - indeed the very behaviours typically promoted by theorists and cultivated in classes by teachers - these are teaching strategies. These are things that the teacher wants the student to do, or usually not just wants but instructs the student to do. They are activities: busy work designed to (and here’s another buzz word) keep the student “engaged”. Engaged means “on task”. On task means: obedient. Compliant. Not asking “off topic” questions and so on. Almost everything ever covered in any “professional development” course or a university-level teacher training course completed by teachers and ostensibly labelled a learning strategy is a teaching strategy. Learning strategies are, I will come to later, very difficult to come by. And that is because learning happens best in a free environment where coercion just is not part of the picture.
So it happens to be the case that one can deploy every teaching strategy in the countless teaching handbooks and websites and seminars ever deployed and learning can still be elusive. Why? Because simply naming something (say) “Nine Hats for better Thinking” does not mean it is genuinely about Thinking. Labelling something does not make it so. Thinking is always a creative process constrained by careful criticism.
But, as I say, educational theorists love neologisms. Educational theorists think that if they come up with a neologism that they have actually invented a new idea. They’re not alone in this. Prominent so-called “public intellectuals” excel at this kind of thing. Inventing words. Typically what they, or the educational theorists have done is either just label common sense, or some older idea, or adapted some pre-existing set of ideas for the purpose of naming it a (teaching or learning) "strategy". And the theorist will always give these a name. In the case of education one might for example want to encourage students to be a physics BRAIN (Copyright) - an idea I came up with when I thought it was the right thing to do. Here’s how it works. Think of something about a given topic that “B” "Bugs" you. Then also something that you can “R” "Reflect" on and “A” "Another" idea related to the one under study. Find something “I” "Interesting" and something “N" "Negative". Make up your own acronym. (I was kidding about the Copyright, by the way). On my own “R" "Reflection" I realised: this scheme, far from organising thoughts, restricted them.
Some people working in business or especially the corporate world might be very familiar with these kind of buzz wordy acronyms. They’re all the rage. Maybe some are useful. Maybe not. But whether in the corporate setting, or educational setting - indeed anywhere one is working - scientific research, music composition, writing, painting, singing, personal relationships or detective work what we really need is straight forward criticism and creativity.
Criticise: what don't you understand? What is wrong? Get to the heart of it. What are you uncomfortable about? That’s a criticism. What feels wrong. Looks wrong. Clearly is wrong or out of place. What is ugly or unkind, what is false? Where’s the lie? Where’s the deficiency? Once you have done this, and succeeded you have identified a problem. You have an error somewhere before you. You can correct it now. You now have the potential to find a solution and all this adds up to the potential for progress. You have criticised. But now what? Well now you create.
Create: can you improve on this? And this, we will find, is the harder part. The much harder part. But whether it’s the criticism part or the create part, we need maximum space and freedom to explore options and for this reason - in education at least - I have tended to avoid ways of “organising thoughts”.
Our minds - human minds - minds - just don't operate that way. And nor should they. There are exceptions to this: wanting to pass exams. And yes - if that is your goal - those many mnemonics, tricks and techniques can seem to work for some. But we must be careful to separate: passing exams is not the same as critical and creative thinking. Passing exams is about adhering as closely as possible to someone else's ideas of what is the correct way to think. It is anti-critical. It is not good objecting to questions in exams - taking issue with the premise of a question. Sure - take a risk. Most will not. Why would they? Certainly examinations and assessment tasks in education generally are antithetical to anything but adhering to, or rising to meet, defined outcomes. Things already thought through. It is thus not only anti-critical it is anti-creativity. It is not about new ideas. It is about showing that you have grasped old ideas. Taught ideas.
See the problem?
And I must say, what I am NOT saying here is that the best way to be creative is just to be maximally free. That’s not the case either. That is why criticism exists. It imposes bounds - whether from reality (which is a severe restriction) or you own personal values (which should be quite restrictive) on what it is right to create. You cannot just create a scientific theory that disagrees with multiple independent tests while contradicting what we already know. And you are not free to create good music that more resembles noise. When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings he found that he himself was not free to just have his characters do whatever his imagination thought. The world had to be internally consistent: his characters had a history (sometimes existing in prequels) and he had a rich language and geography that they had to conform to. This, by the way, is why fans of some blockbuster movies regard some sequels or prequels as objectively worse than so-called “canon”. Canon means “the preexisting background knowledge of the fiction” - so if new writers or directors come along and ignore canon - they have violated the internal consistency of the fictional reality. Some fiction therefore is objectively worse than other fiction precisely because contradictions are always wrong unless you think logic should not be adhered to, in which case there is literally nothing more left to say. Enjoy your contradictions and (literal) absurdity. But I digress:
Let us, now, return to basics. Let us consider what is meant by “Critical and Creative Thinking” and see if these can help us learn.
First: yes - critical and creative thinking - true critical and creative thinking are the very means by which we learn. Indeed they are the only means. They are the whole story. But do we understand that whole story? No - far from it, it would seem. So do we understand anything? Yes, of course - quite a bit.
We have some very good, some very true ideas - and indeed I can put a number on it (in a sense anyway): we understand something less than around half of that story. We understand a lot about critical thinking. We just understand very little about creative thinking.
So let us begin with what we know. (Onto page 2)
While writing this article and recording the associated podcast, I had in mind teachers: they are my primary “target audience” so to speak. But this will, I hope be useful for anyone with a “stake” in the education system: so of course students, their parents, university lecturers, administrators - people in a position to make decisions about schools and curriculum. The topic is essentially “Critical Thinking” and what I think it is, in the Popperian tradition. As I will mention, unlike even just 15 years ago, “Critical Thinking” is now a fashionable term thrown around in schools, universities and among those charged with deciding what students are taught and how. Often “Creative Thinking” is thrown into the mix as well. All sorts of activities are devised for students to improve these “skills”: sometimes entire new subjects are created for students to take that are supposed to be about improving “critical thinking”. It’s all - from the education system’s point of view - very new. And because it’s new *there* they are, largely speaking, inventing things on the fly or designating certain techniques or rules or activities “critical and creative thinking”. It really is all the buzz in many places.
As it is usually crafted, the lofty aim is to provide students with the skills to evaluate and assess claims being made - typically in the news or in history or something like that - and decide whether and to what extent the claim is valid. My present concern here is to summarise some of the already existing philosophy and epistemology content that exists in the tradition known as “critical rationalism” such that it might be useful for anyone in education and expected to teach about or learn “critical thinking” - precisely because there really is a “best explanation” already there of “critical thinking” laid down by philosophers (chiefly Karl Popper) which has failed to explicitly inform what is merely called “critical thinking” in education circles. I regard this as bizarre but not surprising (given the way the academic culture tends to treat the work of Karl Popper). So my aim here is to provide a very practical alternative to those other things labelled “critical thinking”. In doing this I traverse a fair bit of ground that at times might seem only orthogonally related to the ostensible topic of the piece. For example we get into narrow AI vs AGI and I speak about economic systems and some of the broader issues to do with coercion inside and outside of schools. I call the main part of this article “Critical and Creative Thinking 2.0” because I wrote a version of this around 6 years ago. Since then, much has transpired and some of it has affected the emphasis I am placing on certain things. That original article was quite long: this is longer still, which is one reason I have turned it into a podcast. Anyone who wants can listen at 2.0x speed or faster. Again, I hope this is of practical use to anyone with a student in their lives: teachers, parents, administrators and, of course, the students themselves.
Links to the podcast on:
Youtube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
Podbean
Luminary
Critical and Creative Thinking 2.0
This episode, something of a hobby horse of mine. And the reason it is, is because I have worked in education and I have worked in what’s called “curriculum development”. One issue as every teacher knows is that:
Every politician, parent, scientist and “stakeholder” has an opinion about what should be in a school curriculum. Health advocates say nutrition and exercise science. Scientists want more science, psychologists say common cognitive biases, programmers say more coding, conservatives want more civics, finance and economics, socialists push for more gender, race and sexuality studies, philosophers/"critical thinking" gurus say logic and reasoning fallacies; everyone debates the content of history, whether and to what extent religion is taught, half of the mathematicians will say more algebra, the other half will say more calculus and the other half will say more statistics….(yes, I was joking there).
Anyways all the coercion aside, the indoctrination aside and in places like Australia the compulsory nature of everything in the schooling system aside - given this whole unholy system is not going anywhere anytime soon no matter what many of us say about it - it’s worth looking at what could have worked. Or more optimistically: what could work to the extent it can work - even in places where everything is compulsory or coerced.
After all, if school students are getting more calculus when they should be getting statistics, or if they are getting a terribly anti-Western view from history and a science curriculum polluted by politics and activism and pessimism about tomorrow - maybe there is something like so-called “intellectual self defence” to be found in more basic skills? Something like critical and creative thinking skills?
Well it’s actually all the rage right now in education, let me tell you. It’s very fashionable (but then so is almost all the content of the curriculum in schools and universities: it runs on trends and fashions rather too often in too many departments). Most jurisdictions across Australia, the USA, those in the British tradition, in global institutions like the International Baccalaureate Office and of course in the universities now talk about how they teach critical thinking and creative thinking.
I’ve made videos about this before. Years ago. I’ve written about this before - multiple times. But years have passed and a lot has happened even over just the last 5 years. And so I’ve refined my views somewhat - though not entirely changed-the way I phrase things - the underlying ideas are exactly the same but I need to reemphasise some things that I thought, perhaps, went without saying. They don’t. I want to look - critically - at what some institutions describe critical thinking as and therefore why I think they’re wrong. So I’m going to tell you about what it typically is compared to what it could be. Not so much what should be taught in schools - I think that’s entirely the wrong question after all it should be about what someone wants to learn. But if you want to learn what critical thinking and what creative thinking is, I have some ideas here for you.
And also - and I know podcasters and lecturers and so on use this phrase a lot and it rarely ever rings true - the phrase is “People often ask me”. I’ve never had occasion to use it before. But here this really is, if not a question “people often ask me” it is the one I think I have been asked over the years most frequently. That question is - with regards to epistemology especially “What practical use is any of this exactly?”. And so I want to speak about that directly.
Critical and creative thinking amount to educational buzz words these days. I have written before about educational “buzz words” - and there is a real liability with their use. If you want to read about my aversion to such buzz words look up my article on learning (www.bretthall.org/learning). A problem with a buzzword of any kind is that a theorist - especially an educational theorist enamoured with neologisms can tend to co-opt already well defined concepts, redefine them and subject them to a certain species of what is called “lock-in”. Lock in is not a neologism by the way! Lock-in is where, unintentionally, a designed feature has some negative effect upon future potentials for growth. The polymath philosopher, scientist and technologist Jaron Lanier uses the example of the London Underground train system which lacks air-conditioning. Built at a time when air-conditioning was not possible on trains, now that it is, the tubes are simply not large enough for the exhaust required to accommodate air-conditioning systems on the trains and so, for now at least, passengers are locked-in to a hot and uncomfortable system most months of the year.
What has that to do with anything? Well as it can happen our there in the built environment - in train systems - so it can happen in institutions. So for example in education, sometimes, we can define into being some terminology that defines future directions in teaching and this constrains options for what might be learned, and how. For example: does calling certain activities "critical and creative thinking" lock-in how we might think (clearly!) about these ideas? I am now persuaded schools and universities have been headed down the wrong track on this for a while and so for anyone still working in those areas or, perhaps especially, the students in those places subject to these fads, should want to mentally pull the breaks and consider whether - metaphorically speaking - we might not want to widen the tunnel to accommodate some better ideas about what these terms mean.
Critical and creative thinking is the way knowledge is actually generated. As many who listen to this podcast regularly know - how knowledge is generated is the domain of a particular area of philosophy called “epistemology”. Epistemology is one of the most interesting, important and practical areas of philosophy and simultaneously one of the least well understood subjects we might dare say anywhere. People who know little about philosophy (and have little interest in it) can be dismissive of the whole project because they think it - philosophy - is largely concerned with existential naval gazing and it’s all about endless debates in moral philosophy (or ethics), or metaphysics and ontology (concerns about what "really" exists or what ultimately there is to know) or what the true meaning or definition of a particular word is and so ultimately the whole project of “doing philosophy” collapses into nothing more than a clash of mere matters of opinion. But this is false - and in fact it’s a really significant misconception because epistemology especially underlies how you think about everything else. It is the pre-eminent case of thinking - about thinking. And if your thinking is going wrong, then not only is your understanding of science possibly going wrong, and morality possibly going wrong and history possibly going wrong but your very own personal psychology may be possibly going wrong.
My own interests in philosophy have not generally been about ethics or metaphysics so often as about: how can we come to have deep knowledge of the world? And this is what epistemology is: it's literally "the theory of knowledge" (as it is defined in analytical philosophy). And in this area of philosophy there really is a best theory that we should strive to understand. (Not all of what is called "philosophy" is interesting - I agree on that much - and will admit much more later on. But much is worth preserving and trying to learn more about. Not least of which is epistemology as it's relevant to learning - the subject of this podcast and epistemology as it is currently best understood and how it applies to having an optimistic view of humanity and life. Oh, and the philosophy of science is absolutely crucial if you want to understand how scientific knowledge in particular grows. But I begin to digress...)
Returning to our definition of epistemology as "the theory of knowledge" we can rephrase it without any loss of meaning whatever to: epistemology is the explanation of the growth of knowledge. And this "growth of knowledge" can happen as a civilisation or it can happen inside a single mind of a learner. The processes, it turns out, are the same. Let me explain. There are two absolutely crucial aspects to the growth of knowledge: creativity and criticism.
In educational circles the terms “critical and creative thinking” have migrated away from how they have largely, and more precisely, been used in the more rarefied spheres where they have been genuine domains of study, controversy and progress over decades.
The terms now are synonymous not with thinking as such but rather certain teaching strategies that are more or less fashionable among some educators and educational theorists. Now I should add that there is a world of difference between a teaching strategy and a learning strategy as anyone involved in education should know, but in practise never seems to take seriously.
It is safe to say that almost all strategies used by teachers to teach students are the former (teaching strategies) - not the latter (actual learning strategies). Teaching strategies: which are typically ways of (usually coercively) organising schoolwork, or ideas on paper - ways of having students respond to questions or complete tasks - whether they move around a class, speak or not speak, draw pictures or write words - indeed the very behaviours typically promoted by theorists and cultivated in classes by teachers - these are teaching strategies. These are things that the teacher wants the student to do, or usually not just wants but instructs the student to do. They are activities: busy work designed to (and here’s another buzz word) keep the student “engaged”. Engaged means “on task”. On task means: obedient. Compliant. Not asking “off topic” questions and so on. Almost everything ever covered in any “professional development” course or a university-level teacher training course completed by teachers and ostensibly labelled a learning strategy is a teaching strategy. Learning strategies are, I will come to later, very difficult to come by. And that is because learning happens best in a free environment where coercion just is not part of the picture.
So it happens to be the case that one can deploy every teaching strategy in the countless teaching handbooks and websites and seminars ever deployed and learning can still be elusive. Why? Because simply naming something (say) “Nine Hats for better Thinking” does not mean it is genuinely about Thinking. Labelling something does not make it so. Thinking is always a creative process constrained by careful criticism.
But, as I say, educational theorists love neologisms. Educational theorists think that if they come up with a neologism that they have actually invented a new idea. They’re not alone in this. Prominent so-called “public intellectuals” excel at this kind of thing. Inventing words. Typically what they, or the educational theorists have done is either just label common sense, or some older idea, or adapted some pre-existing set of ideas for the purpose of naming it a (teaching or learning) "strategy". And the theorist will always give these a name. In the case of education one might for example want to encourage students to be a physics BRAIN (Copyright) - an idea I came up with when I thought it was the right thing to do. Here’s how it works. Think of something about a given topic that “B” "Bugs" you. Then also something that you can “R” "Reflect" on and “A” "Another" idea related to the one under study. Find something “I” "Interesting" and something “N" "Negative". Make up your own acronym. (I was kidding about the Copyright, by the way). On my own “R" "Reflection" I realised: this scheme, far from organising thoughts, restricted them.
Some people working in business or especially the corporate world might be very familiar with these kind of buzz wordy acronyms. They’re all the rage. Maybe some are useful. Maybe not. But whether in the corporate setting, or educational setting - indeed anywhere one is working - scientific research, music composition, writing, painting, singing, personal relationships or detective work what we really need is straight forward criticism and creativity.
Criticise: what don't you understand? What is wrong? Get to the heart of it. What are you uncomfortable about? That’s a criticism. What feels wrong. Looks wrong. Clearly is wrong or out of place. What is ugly or unkind, what is false? Where’s the lie? Where’s the deficiency? Once you have done this, and succeeded you have identified a problem. You have an error somewhere before you. You can correct it now. You now have the potential to find a solution and all this adds up to the potential for progress. You have criticised. But now what? Well now you create.
Create: can you improve on this? And this, we will find, is the harder part. The much harder part. But whether it’s the criticism part or the create part, we need maximum space and freedom to explore options and for this reason - in education at least - I have tended to avoid ways of “organising thoughts”.
Our minds - human minds - minds - just don't operate that way. And nor should they. There are exceptions to this: wanting to pass exams. And yes - if that is your goal - those many mnemonics, tricks and techniques can seem to work for some. But we must be careful to separate: passing exams is not the same as critical and creative thinking. Passing exams is about adhering as closely as possible to someone else's ideas of what is the correct way to think. It is anti-critical. It is not good objecting to questions in exams - taking issue with the premise of a question. Sure - take a risk. Most will not. Why would they? Certainly examinations and assessment tasks in education generally are antithetical to anything but adhering to, or rising to meet, defined outcomes. Things already thought through. It is thus not only anti-critical it is anti-creativity. It is not about new ideas. It is about showing that you have grasped old ideas. Taught ideas.
See the problem?
And I must say, what I am NOT saying here is that the best way to be creative is just to be maximally free. That’s not the case either. That is why criticism exists. It imposes bounds - whether from reality (which is a severe restriction) or you own personal values (which should be quite restrictive) on what it is right to create. You cannot just create a scientific theory that disagrees with multiple independent tests while contradicting what we already know. And you are not free to create good music that more resembles noise. When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings he found that he himself was not free to just have his characters do whatever his imagination thought. The world had to be internally consistent: his characters had a history (sometimes existing in prequels) and he had a rich language and geography that they had to conform to. This, by the way, is why fans of some blockbuster movies regard some sequels or prequels as objectively worse than so-called “canon”. Canon means “the preexisting background knowledge of the fiction” - so if new writers or directors come along and ignore canon - they have violated the internal consistency of the fictional reality. Some fiction therefore is objectively worse than other fiction precisely because contradictions are always wrong unless you think logic should not be adhered to, in which case there is literally nothing more left to say. Enjoy your contradictions and (literal) absurdity. But I digress:
Let us, now, return to basics. Let us consider what is meant by “Critical and Creative Thinking” and see if these can help us learn.
First: yes - critical and creative thinking - true critical and creative thinking are the very means by which we learn. Indeed they are the only means. They are the whole story. But do we understand that whole story? No - far from it, it would seem. So do we understand anything? Yes, of course - quite a bit.
We have some very good, some very true ideas - and indeed I can put a number on it (in a sense anyway): we understand something less than around half of that story. We understand a lot about critical thinking. We just understand very little about creative thinking.
So let us begin with what we know. (Onto page 2)