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Critical Thinking and the Social Studies Teacher

Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education

Ethics Without Indoctrination

Engineering Reasoning

Accelerating Change

Applied Disciplines: A Critical Thinking Model for Engineering

Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission

Natural Egocentric Dispositions

Diversity: Making Sense of It Through Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking, Moral Integrity and Citizenship

Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence


  


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Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission


And Why It Will Be Difficult to Achieve
Linda Elder, July 2000
Since the inception of the two-year college almost a hundred years ago, it has served a unique role in the fabric of American society. The community college has sometimes been hailed as the last best chance for many older "returning" students who, for whatever reason, never pursued college upon graduation from high school, and who need to find an employment niche with little time to spare. It has also been regarded as a "secure" starting point for fresh high school grads who want to "get their feet wet" before going on to four year colleges or universities.
These are undoubtedly only two among a variety of reasons why each fall approximately 5.6 million students now choose the two-year college in this country. But perhaps the greatest contribution of the community college has been its emphasis on teaching students what they will need to become competent employees upon graduation. To a large extent students enroll in two-year college programs to gain skills and abilities necessary for employment; and many, if not most, community college faculty have maintained classrooms which emphasize learning the technical skills that enable students to do just that.
Until recently, classroom structures which involve "hands on learning" with primary focus on teaching technical skills have, in general, provided specialized abilities students have needed to find gainful employment. However, as the economic structure of the world becomes more complex, as technology continues to transform itself, as the rate of change accelerates, and as we become increasingly more interdependent both at home and abroad, "training" students for job performance in narrowly defined skill areas no longer serves students well.
The Emergent Requirements of Work
The emergent job market holds a number of challenges, for which the average worker simply is not prepared, given current educational practices:
1.the definition and status of virtually every job is in a state of increasing flux

2.entire fields of work now disappear with greater and greater frequency (and unpredictability)

3.more and more jobs involve increasing complexity

4.it is increasingly common for employees to have to understand and work with abstract systems (which are themselves in a continual state of flux)

5.employees are increasingly expected not only to use established procedures but to suggest new ones and be open to change and self-assessment

6.there is increasing emphasis on the ability to clearly communicate with others about mutual problems and the interfacing of multiple systems.
Keenly aware of this reality, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, has pointed out that competent employees in the coming years must be able to think in ways not only not yet emphasized in most present instruction, but in ways that are unpredictable except in broad terms. In The Work of Nations (1992), Reich puts it this way
“...in the new economy--replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions, and untried means of putting them together--mastery of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income. Nor, importantly, is it even necessary...Facts, codes, formulae, and rules are easily accessible. What is much more valuable is the capacity to effectively and creatively use the knowledge (p. 182).”
Indeed successful workers of the future must possess intellectual tools which will render them mentally flexible and intellectually disciplined, and thus able to bring higher level thinking to bear on higher level problems. They must, in essence, be able to think critically, to do things with their minds that enable them to effectively handle complex intellectual tasks -- many of which they were not trained for.
 According to Reich, instruction which adequately prepares students to function well as high level thinkers,
"instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. The student is taught to get behind the data - to ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, how they were deduced, and how they might be contradicted. The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices (p. 230)."
Through such emphasis in the classroom, the mind, he says "is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative (p. 230)."
The higher order thinking that will be required in successful workers of the future is best understood as disciplined reasoning that directs and redirects thinking along a problem solving path, clarifying and checking itself as it goes. To get a glimpse of such disciplined reasoning consider this hypothetical rendering of the inner voice of the critical thinker--reasoning through an issue:
Let’s see...what exactly is the problem? Is there another way to view it? Is this a question that requires judgment, or is there an established procedure for solving it? What information do I need to gather to address the problem? Have I gathered a sufficient amount of information? Is there another way to interpret this information? Do I need to consider some other points of view? What am I taking for granted? Am I making some assumptions I need to question? Have I considered all the possibilities? What are the implications if I make this decision? And if I make that?...
Sooner or later, employees of the future will be able to make intellectual moves such as these. After all, large amounts of money are made or lost:
•in virtue of attention to, or inattention to, accuracy and precision of information

•in virtue of recognizing, or failing to recognize, important implications

•in virtue of grasping, or failing to grasp, important assumptions

•of interpreting, or failing to interpret, information in alternative ways

•of seeing, or failing to see, a situation from alternative points of view

•of structuring thinking so that is clear and relevant, precise and logical, or failing to so structure thinking, resulting in thinking that it is sloppy, confused, irrelevant, imprecise or illogical
What Does This Mean for Our Conception of Instruction?
Given this reality, it is clear that we are faced with a serious problem. The swiftly changing economic world requires of our graduates intellectual capabilities which traditional instruction simply is not fostering. To effectively teach, we cannot merely make minor changes in classroom practices. The old model of education no longer serves us well. We need a radically new way of thinking about instruction that replaces instructional beliefs and practices out of alignment with economic reality and transforms our view of education itself.
In what follows I provide a foundation for beginning to understand the conceptual and theoretical changes that must take place in the mind of community college instructors if such a transformation is to be achieved. It should be noted, however, that I will not be dealing, except in passing, with the kinds of teaching strategies that these conceptual changes require. In this article I will simply draw some important contrasts between the thinking behind the present model and that required by the emergent future.
The Struggle of the Old and the New
Before we begin our brief journey, let’s get an overview of the path we shall follow. There are three dimensions I will delineate, though the reader should remember that the dimensions are non-linear in nature and hence do not describe a sequence in either teaching or learning. The sequence I present is one of convenience only.
In the first dimension, I sketch a new understanding of "content" and how it is to be "covered." Here we move from thinking about "covering" content through traditional lectures to thinking about how to challenge students to think through the content in a deeply engaged way. We no longer think of content as a collection of data, concepts, and procedures, but as a dynamic mode of thinking, which is truly comprehended only by an actively engaged thinker. "I don’t give you data to memorize about management, I expect you to think like a manager." In this model, history is taught as historical thinking, accounting as the art of thinking like an accountant, etc.
In the second dimension, the nature of thinking itself is re-thought. It is no longer enough to simply process the steps of an established procedure; one must learn how to use thinking to examine critically the procedures in use. In this dimension we are forced to another facet of the new model: a new and explicit understanding of the elemental components of reasoning--structures which students must learn to use explicitly. In the new model, we teach students how to manipulate these "structures" explicitly to improve their reasoning. Through this new mode of self-command students learn how to learn, how to internalize new systems and procedures. For example, in the new model students learn the discipline of distinguishing three kinds of questions: "one-system" questions, "no-system" questions, and "multi-system" questions. Understanding this distinction enables students to move from a primary focus on questions of simple fact to more challenging questions which require advanced reasoned judgment.
In the third dimension, there is a shift at the level of standards. We move from an emphasis on narrow or domain-specific technical criteria to an emphasis on teaching universal intellectual standards. In the new model, we teach students how to use universal standards that enable them to monitor their thinking, to adequately assess and improve it.
In general, you should note that all of the changes the new model of instruction requires are ones that reflect a fundamental re-orientation--from training a mind that simply follows established directions and procedures to educating a person who analyzes, evaluates, and produces new directions and new procedures. We move to an emphasis on effectively confronting the complexities inherent in a rapidly changing world.
Dimension One:
 Content as Thinking
In the old approach to instruction, content has been understood as information students assemble from textbooks and lectures, or as procedures detailed in a manual. The content is "given" to students. The students then "give it back" to the instructor in the same form they received it. Rote memorization is the dominant mode of learning. Regurgitation. Commit it to memory. Spit it back. When exam times come, students cram, cram, cram.
In the new model, content is thought through by the students in challenging activities. Content is treated as inseparable from thinking. In fact content is understood precisely as a mode of thinking. Geography is understood as geographical thinking; Anatomy as anatomical thinking; Chemistry as chemical thinking; etc.
For example, an instructor might begin a basic algebra class with the announcement that the course will focus on algebraic thinking. The students would then be coached in algebraic thinking in collaborative groups. The students would be expected to explain how they were using algebraic principles in their thinking. Seminal insights into basic principles of algebra would replace memorization of algorithms and fixed algebraic procedures. Instructors would ensure that genuine understanding was achieved before students would move to new concepts.
In a new model history class, for example, we would want students to reason historically in a multitude of ways, including being able to ask important questions that historians ask. But even more important we want students to be able to deal with the historical questions in their own lives and to develop question-analyzing skills that they can use in every subject they study. We want them, routinely, to be able to relate the questions they study in one class to questions in other classes, and to important questions in their lives. We want them thinking so that they are continually making connections and weaving important ideas together.
To sum up the first dimension, the new model our teaching is based on the assumption that to effectively learn content students must critically think it through. Thus, as instructors, we aim at the dual purpose of helping students develop their reasoning abilities (in general) while they are “thinking through” our content (in particular). In participating in a new model class, students are simultaneously learning highly transferable intellectual skills as they are approaching domain-specific problems. The domain-specific problems are approached with a view to how we can approach any problem in any context. Thus we use our content, not as an end in itself, but as a powerful academic means to the broader goal of teaching students how to clearly articulate problems, how to gather information to address those problems, and how to come up with feasible solutions--irrespective of the domain of the problems.
Dimension Two:
 Rethinking Thinking and Its Parts
In the second dimension, the very nature of thinking itself is re-thought. No longer is it enough to blindly follow the steps of a procedure, the student must now learn how to actively reason between and among conflicting procedures, to make decisions involving conflicting systems, to exercise conscious reasoned judgment.
 In the old model, reasoning was understood as a narrow set of skills students needed to learn to perform certain specific tasks on the job. "Follow this step by step procedure to solve these problems." "When this happens take this step."
"When that happens take this other step." Thinking is proceduralized. Reasoned judgment, involving the comparing of conflicting procedures, was minimized.
 The new model focuses on developing in the minds of students awareness of the possibility of their making a whole family of powerful intellectual moves, intellectual patterns which aid them in reasoning well with respect to any issue or problem they might face. In the new model, students to learn to go beyond strict procedures.
They learn to assess and improve procedures. To do this they need to know how to "orchestrate" intellectual acts in their minds while they are reasoning. They must learn a systematic way to take their thinking apart--irrespective of what they are thinking about. Such skills require an insight into how the intellect functions when it is reasoning well. Let’s look at those key functions briefly.
According to one of the best known authorities on critical thinking, Richard Paul (1995), whenever we reason, however well or poorly, we use eight structures. The structures include question, purpose, information, interpretation, assumptions, concepts, point of view, and implications. These "elements" are always embedded in our thinking, for:
•whenever we reason, we do so for a purpose

•our purpose requires us to settle or answer at least one question

•to answer our question, we need some information

•to use that information, we must interpret it

•to interpret it, we must use some concepts

•to use some concepts, we must make some assumptions

•to make some assumptions, we must think within a point of view

•however, we think our thinking has implications
Being able to take charge of our thinking in a broad and disciplined manner requires that we learn how to routinely take charge of these kinds of structures. How well we do so ultimately determines the quality of our reasoning in any given situation. For example, take the category of "question" as a case in point.
In the old model, problem-centered instruction primarily focused on questions of fact (one-system questions), questions for which there is only one right answer (because we have a system in place for answering them). And when facing a complicated question with better and worse answers, students often reasoned poorly. These "solutions" they came up with were often poorly supported because the students lacked perspective in reasoning whenever they did not have a fixed procedure to follow.
In contrast, the new model focuses, not on questions of fact (though of course students must master questions of fact), but primarily on questions that require students to make reasoned judgments (multi-system questions). Why? Because complex problems, the type they will face when they enter the workplace, inherently call for high quality judgments between conflicting systems or approaches.
In the new model, then, students learn to explicitly identify the kind of problem or question they are dealing with (Richard Paul, 1995). Is it a one-system question (with one correct answer)? Is it a no-system question (with every answer a matter of pure subjective preference)? Or is it a multi-system question (with better and worse answers)? Let us now look more closely at these three kinds of questions.
 The first type of question involves one established system or procedure for obtaining the answer. The objective when dealing with questions in this category is to determine what that established method is, and then to follow the identified method to the answer. These are questions of fact, or knowledge. Examples are: What is the boiling point of lead? What is the differential of this equation? What is the chemical composition of air? How does the motherboard on this type of computer work?"
The old mode of instruction focuses predominantly on these one-system questions and treats them as ends themselves. In the new model questions of fact are mastered in relation to questions that call for reasoned judgment. Thus students learn the value of being able to find information; they learn various ways to locate facts; but they learn to do so primarily as part of the reasoning process when dealing with complex questions.
The second type of question, questions involving preference, are questions for which there are as many right answers as there are individual responses. Examples of this sort of question include "What is your favorite color of cabinet? What type of food do you like best? Would you rather wear blue jeans or sweat pants? What kind of job do you enjoy best? Answers to this second type of question cannot be critiqued since they involve pure subjective taste. Thus in the new mode of instruction students learn that answers to such questions cannot be assessed. Any answer is as good as any other answer. As a result we avoid focusing attention on these dead-end questions. We set the purely subjective aside to deal with those matters where judgment and quality of reasoning are essential.
The third type of question is, as we have seen, that which is dominant in the new economic realities. These are questions to which there is no one right or wrong answer, though evidence and reasoning are essential to the plausible answering of them. There is no one established way of thinking about them, though how we think about them has important implications in our economic lives. These are questions which frequently call for crucial answers.
Our economic success often depends upon them. They are questions that require our best thinking--because they require thinking within multiple points of view and marshaling information in the best way we can. Questions in this category include: "What are the best methods for reducing crime in America? What is our best strategy for meeting the new product line introduced by our competitor? How can we best invest this capital? What is the best strategy for increasing our productivity level while also improving the quality of our products? How can we improve morale at the same time that we downsize?"
Being able to routinely distinguish one-system, non-system, and multi-system questions illustrates one important way in which students must learn to take command of the various component structures in their thought. If they don’t achieve intellectual control over the problem they are trying to solve, they will not be able to solve it. We cannot solve problems we don’t understand.
In the new model, then, we explicitly teach students to take their thinking apart, to take charge of the structures in which they are reasoning, and we do this in conjunction with students learning a set of universal standards for assessing thinking. Let us now turn to the question of standards.




Dimension Three:
 Teaching Students Universal Intellectual Standards
In the third dimension, we recognize the need for universal standards for thought. The old model of instruction emphasized domain-specific technical criteria. "Perform this procedure in this way." "Answer 90% of the test questions correctly." "Follow these directions." "Demonstrate that you can apply these mathematical formulas."
The new approach, concerned with holding students responsible for their thinking in a generalizable way emphasizes broad-based, not domain-specific intellectual standards. Thus students come to understand what it means to think and to act as persons who are intellectually responsible for their performance--in general, not just in standardized technical problems they can predict. For example, the new model emphasizes the following:
1.to think well, one must think clearly

2.to think well, one must think accurately

3.to think well, one must think precisely

4.to think well, one must think relevantly

5.to think well one must think deeply

6.to think well, one must think broad-mindedly

7.to think well, one must think logically.
In the old model students often learned how to function competently only in a narrow job and with standard problems, while their thinking in general remained largely undisciplined. Outside a narrow sphere of performance they often thought unclearly, inaccurately, imprecisely, irrelevantly, superficially, and illogically. Needless to say this did not auger well for their performance outside their special competence.
As long as much of student thinking remains subconscious--as it does for most students (since they lack the skills to bring it to their conscious minds for scrutiny)--it tends to operate with "standards" that cannot consciously be justified. In fact, if we pay special attention to how students decide to accept or reject ideas, we will find that most students use standards that are actually anti-intellectual in nature. They use standards that emerge from primitive human drives, standards that subconsciously control their thinking and leave their thinking deeply flawed.
Here are the most common standards that students use (unfortunately, they are precisely the ones most undisciplined thinkers use). They are:
1.believe an idea if it agrees with what you already believe (an egocentric standard)

2.believe an idea if it agrees with what your friends or associates believe (a sociocentric standard)

3.believe an idea if you want to believe it (an exercise in willful self-deception).
Think of the way the brass of Detroit auto reasoned during the 15 years that they were losing market share to the Japanese: "These Japanese cars are nothing but a fad. Americans don’t want small economic cars. They want style and size and comfort. We just need to outlast the fad, not change our basic manufacturing strategies." It wasn’t until Detroit went virtually bankrupt that they considered an alternative line of thought. Their agreement with each other, their tendency to believe what they wanted to believe, were the ruling standards for their thinking. They invested billions in lousy thinking. And the US economy suffered a severe blow because of it.
Obviously, these are not standards for thinking that we want to foster in our students. Yet the old model fails to teach students how to recognize when these standards are at work in their thinking.
In the new model, however, students are taught to guard against natural human tendencies to believe what agrees with them or what they want to believe. Instead they learn to how to maximize objectivity in assessment, however painful the "truth" might be. Without this discipline, students will be frustrated in complicated or messy problems and will retreat to comfortable beliefs. Accordingly, instead of exercising self-determination in their thinking, students become victims of their thinking. In the old model, students don’t control their thinking; their thinking controls them.
Conclusion
It is now undebatable that workers of tomorrow must have basic critical thinking abilities if they are to function well in the complex world of accelerating change that now faces them. They must have the intellectual skills to competently address new questions and problems inherent in the new emerging world of work. This involves the ability to take thinking apart and analyze it, as well as to consistently apply intellectual standards to it. They must be able to accurately and consistently assess their thinking, to determine, their own strengths and weaknesses and project strategies for continual improvement.
Since two-year colleges have historically led the higher education community in preparing students for the world of work, they are in a unique position to take the lead once again. But this involves commitment and leadership on the part of the faculty and the administration.
The shift from the old to the new model is not a casual or easy shift. It will be years before it occurs at most four-year colleges and universities--where teaching effectiveness is a secondary factor. It will not occur easily at any level of education.
It will certainly not occur at the community college level simply because community college faculty read a general argument for the new model such as this article constitutes. One might begin with such an article. But one does not end with it. Faculty need quality Inservice in the design of instruction based on new model criteria. They need paradigms. They need examples. They need practice. And they need to be encouraged and rewarded for designing new model classes.
If we are to make the changes necessary for our students to compete in a highly complex global market, the band-aid, quick fix approach to transforming our educational systems must be abandoned. With leadership and determination the new community college of the future can and will emerge. But that leadership and determination will not be successfully generated unless we are willing to do the intellectual work necessary to transform our own thinking. We need to think our own way into new conceptions about what teaching and learning are all about. We need bona fide critical thinking. As Richard Paul has said:
“What we can be sure of is that the persuasiveness of the argument for critical thinking will only grow year by year, day by day -- for the logic of the argument is simply the only prudent response to the accelerating change, to the increasing complexity of our world. No gimmick, no crafty substitute, can be found for the cultivation of quality thinking. The quality of our lives can only become more and more obviously the product of the quality of the thinking we use to create them (p. 16)...Our students deserve at least a fighting chance to compete, to rise to the challenge of the day (p.5).”
All quotes by Richard Paul in this article are taken from the book by Paul, R. (1995). Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World. Dillon Beach: Foundation For Critical Thinking
Go to top






Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Commun
Sublinks:
Critical Thinking and the Social Studies Teacher
Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education
Ethics Without Indoctrination
Engineering Reasoning
Accelerating Change
Applied Disciplines: A Critical Thinking Model for Engineering
Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission
Natural Egocentric Dispositions
Diversity: Making Sense of It Through Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking, Moral Integrity and Citizenship
Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence



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Page Menu

Critical Thinking and the Social Studies Teacher

Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education

Ethics Without Indoctrination

Engineering Reasoning

Accelerating Change

Applied Disciplines: A Critical Thinking Model for Engineering

Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission

Natural Egocentric Dispositions

Diversity: Making Sense of It Through Critical Thinking

Critical Thinking, Moral Integrity and Citizenship

Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence


  


Translate this page from English...


Select LanguageAfrikaansAlbanianArabicArmenianAzerbaijaniBasqueBelarusianBengaliBosnianBulgarianCatalanCebuanoChichewaChinese (Simplified)Chinese (Traditional)CroatianCzechDanishDutchEsperantoEstonianFilipinoFinnishFrenchGalicianGeorgianGermanGreekGujaratiHaitian CreoleHausaHebrewHindiHmongHungarianIcelandicIgboIndonesianIrishItalianJapaneseJavaneseKannadaKazakhKhmerKoreanLaoLatinLatvianLithuanianMacedonianMalagasyMalayMalayalamMalteseMaoriMarathiMongolianMyanmar (Burmese)NepaliNorwegianPersianPolishPortuguesePunjabiRomanianRussianSerbianSesothoSinhalaSlovakSlovenianSomaliSpanishSundaneseSwahiliSwedishTajikTamilTeluguThaiTurkishUkrainianUrduUzbekVietnameseWelshYiddishYorubaZulu
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Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission


And Why It Will Be Difficult to Achieve
Linda Elder, July 2000
Since the inception of the two-year college almost a hundred years ago, it has served a unique role in the fabric of American society. The community college has sometimes been hailed as the last best chance for many older "returning" students who, for whatever reason, never pursued college upon graduation from high school, and who need to find an employment niche with little time to spare. It has also been regarded as a "secure" starting point for fresh high school grads who want to "get their feet wet" before going on to four year colleges or universities.
These are undoubtedly only two among a variety of reasons why each fall approximately 5.6 million students now choose the two-year college in this country. But perhaps the greatest contribution of the community college has been its emphasis on teaching students what they will need to become competent employees upon graduation. To a large extent students enroll in two-year college programs to gain skills and abilities necessary for employment; and many, if not most, community college faculty have maintained classrooms which emphasize learning the technical skills that enable students to do just that.
Until recently, classroom structures which involve "hands on learning" with primary focus on teaching technical skills have, in general, provided specialized abilities students have needed to find gainful employment. However, as the economic structure of the world becomes more complex, as technology continues to transform itself, as the rate of change accelerates, and as we become increasingly more interdependent both at home and abroad, "training" students for job performance in narrowly defined skill areas no longer serves students well.
The Emergent Requirements of Work
The emergent job market holds a number of challenges, for which the average worker simply is not prepared, given current educational practices:
1.the definition and status of virtually every job is in a state of increasing flux

2.entire fields of work now disappear with greater and greater frequency (and unpredictability)

3.more and more jobs involve increasing complexity

4.it is increasingly common for employees to have to understand and work with abstract systems (which are themselves in a continual state of flux)

5.employees are increasingly expected not only to use established procedures but to suggest new ones and be open to change and self-assessment

6.there is increasing emphasis on the ability to clearly communicate with others about mutual problems and the interfacing of multiple systems.
Keenly aware of this reality, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, has pointed out that competent employees in the coming years must be able to think in ways not only not yet emphasized in most present instruction, but in ways that are unpredictable except in broad terms. In The Work of Nations (1992), Reich puts it this way
“...in the new economy--replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions, and untried means of putting them together--mastery of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income. Nor, importantly, is it even necessary...Facts, codes, formulae, and rules are easily accessible. What is much more valuable is the capacity to effectively and creatively use the knowledge (p. 182).”
Indeed successful workers of the future must possess intellectual tools which will render them mentally flexible and intellectually disciplined, and thus able to bring higher level thinking to bear on higher level problems. They must, in essence, be able to think critically, to do things with their minds that enable them to effectively handle complex intellectual tasks -- many of which they were not trained for.
 According to Reich, instruction which adequately prepares students to function well as high level thinkers,
"instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. The student is taught to get behind the data - to ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, how they were deduced, and how they might be contradicted. The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices (p. 230)."
Through such emphasis in the classroom, the mind, he says "is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative (p. 230)."
The higher order thinking that will be required in successful workers of the future is best understood as disciplined reasoning that directs and redirects thinking along a problem solving path, clarifying and checking itself as it goes. To get a glimpse of such disciplined reasoning consider this hypothetical rendering of the inner voice of the critical thinker--reasoning through an issue:
Let’s see...what exactly is the problem? Is there another way to view it? Is this a question that requires judgment, or is there an established procedure for solving it? What information do I need to gather to address the problem? Have I gathered a sufficient amount of information? Is there another way to interpret this information? Do I need to consider some other points of view? What am I taking for granted? Am I making some assumptions I need to question? Have I considered all the possibilities? What are the implications if I make this decision? And if I make that?...
Sooner or later, employees of the future will be able to make intellectual moves such as these. After all, large amounts of money are made or lost:
•in virtue of attention to, or inattention to, accuracy and precision of information

•in virtue of recognizing, or failing to recognize, important implications

•in virtue of grasping, or failing to grasp, important assumptions

•of interpreting, or failing to interpret, information in alternative ways

•of seeing, or failing to see, a situation from alternative points of view

•of structuring thinking so that is clear and relevant, precise and logical, or failing to so structure thinking, resulting in thinking that it is sloppy, confused, irrelevant, imprecise or illogical
What Does This Mean for Our Conception of Instruction?
Given this reality, it is clear that we are faced with a serious problem. The swiftly changing economic world requires of our graduates intellectual capabilities which traditional instruction simply is not fostering. To effectively teach, we cannot merely make minor changes in classroom practices. The old model of education no longer serves us well. We need a radically new way of thinking about instruction that replaces instructional beliefs and practices out of alignment with economic reality and transforms our view of education itself.
In what follows I provide a foundation for beginning to understand the conceptual and theoretical changes that must take place in the mind of community college instructors if such a transformation is to be achieved. It should be noted, however, that I will not be dealing, except in passing, with the kinds of teaching strategies that these conceptual changes require. In this article I will simply draw some important contrasts between the thinking behind the present model and that required by the emergent future.
The Struggle of the Old and the New
Before we begin our brief journey, let’s get an overview of the path we shall follow. There are three dimensions I will delineate, though the reader should remember that the dimensions are non-linear in nature and hence do not describe a sequence in either teaching or learning. The sequence I present is one of convenience only.
In the first dimension, I sketch a new understanding of "content" and how it is to be "covered." Here we move from thinking about "covering" content through traditional lectures to thinking about how to challenge students to think through the content in a deeply engaged way. We no longer think of content as a collection of data, concepts, and procedures, but as a dynamic mode of thinking, which is truly comprehended only by an actively engaged thinker. "I don’t give you data to memorize about management, I expect you to think like a manager." In this model, history is taught as historical thinking, accounting as the art of thinking like an accountant, etc.
In the second dimension, the nature of thinking itself is re-thought. It is no longer enough to simply process the steps of an established procedure; one must learn how to use thinking to examine critically the procedures in use. In this dimension we are forced to another facet of the new model: a new and explicit understanding of the elemental components of reasoning--structures which students must learn to use explicitly. In the new model, we teach students how to manipulate these "structures" explicitly to improve their reasoning. Through this new mode of self-command students learn how to learn, how to internalize new systems and procedures. For example, in the new model students learn the discipline of distinguishing three kinds of questions: "one-system" questions, "no-system" questions, and "multi-system" questions. Understanding this distinction enables students to move from a primary focus on questions of simple fact to more challenging questions which require advanced reasoned judgment.
In the third dimension, there is a shift at the level of standards. We move from an emphasis on narrow or domain-specific technical criteria to an emphasis on teaching universal intellectual standards. In the new model, we teach students how to use universal standards that enable them to monitor their thinking, to adequately assess and improve it.
In general, you should note that all of the changes the new model of instruction requires are ones that reflect a fundamental re-orientation--from training a mind that simply follows established directions and procedures to educating a person who analyzes, evaluates, and produces new directions and new procedures. We move to an emphasis on effectively confronting the complexities inherent in a rapidly changing world.
Dimension One:
 Content as Thinking
In the old approach to instruction, content has been understood as information students assemble from textbooks and lectures, or as procedures detailed in a manual. The content is "given" to students. The students then "give it back" to the instructor in the same form they received it. Rote memorization is the dominant mode of learning. Regurgitation. Commit it to memory. Spit it back. When exam times come, students cram, cram, cram.
In the new model, content is thought through by the students in challenging activities. Content is treated as inseparable from thinking. In fact content is understood precisely as a mode of thinking. Geography is understood as geographical thinking; Anatomy as anatomical thinking; Chemistry as chemical thinking; etc.
For example, an instructor might begin a basic algebra class with the announcement that the course will focus on algebraic thinking. The students would then be coached in algebraic thinking in collaborative groups. The students would be expected to explain how they were using algebraic principles in their thinking. Seminal insights into basic principles of algebra would replace memorization of algorithms and fixed algebraic procedures. Instructors would ensure that genuine understanding was achieved before students would move to new concepts.
In a new model history class, for example, we would want students to reason historically in a multitude of ways, including being able to ask important questions that historians ask. But even more important we want students to be able to deal with the historical questions in their own lives and to develop question-analyzing skills that they can use in every subject they study. We want them, routinely, to be able to relate the questions they study in one class to questions in other classes, and to important questions in their lives. We want them thinking so that they are continually making connections and weaving important ideas together.
To sum up the first dimension, the new model our teaching is based on the assumption that to effectively learn content students must critically think it through. Thus, as instructors, we aim at the dual purpose of helping students develop their reasoning abilities (in general) while they are “thinking through” our content (in particular). In participating in a new model class, students are simultaneously learning highly transferable intellectual skills as they are approaching domain-specific problems. The domain-specific problems are approached with a view to how we can approach any problem in any context. Thus we use our content, not as an end in itself, but as a powerful academic means to the broader goal of teaching students how to clearly articulate problems, how to gather information to address those problems, and how to come up with feasible solutions--irrespective of the domain of the problems.
Dimension Two:
 Rethinking Thinking and Its Parts
In the second dimension, the very nature of thinking itself is re-thought. No longer is it enough to blindly follow the steps of a procedure, the student must now learn how to actively reason between and among conflicting procedures, to make decisions involving conflicting systems, to exercise conscious reasoned judgment.
 In the old model, reasoning was understood as a narrow set of skills students needed to learn to perform certain specific tasks on the job. "Follow this step by step procedure to solve these problems." "When this happens take this step."
"When that happens take this other step." Thinking is proceduralized. Reasoned judgment, involving the comparing of conflicting procedures, was minimized.
 The new model focuses on developing in the minds of students awareness of the possibility of their making a whole family of powerful intellectual moves, intellectual patterns which aid them in reasoning well with respect to any issue or problem they might face. In the new model, students to learn to go beyond strict procedures.
They learn to assess and improve procedures. To do this they need to know how to "orchestrate" intellectual acts in their minds while they are reasoning. They must learn a systematic way to take their thinking apart--irrespective of what they are thinking about. Such skills require an insight into how the intellect functions when it is reasoning well. Let’s look at those key functions briefly.
According to one of the best known authorities on critical thinking, Richard Paul (1995), whenever we reason, however well or poorly, we use eight structures. The structures include question, purpose, information, interpretation, assumptions, concepts, point of view, and implications. These "elements" are always embedded in our thinking, for:
•whenever we reason, we do so for a purpose

•our purpose requires us to settle or answer at least one question

•to answer our question, we need some information

•to use that information, we must interpret it

•to interpret it, we must use some concepts

•to use some concepts, we must make some assumptions

•to make some assumptions, we must think within a point of view

•however, we think our thinking has implications
Being able to take charge of our thinking in a broad and disciplined manner requires that we learn how to routinely take charge of these kinds of structures. How well we do so ultimately determines the quality of our reasoning in any given situation. For example, take the category of "question" as a case in point.
In the old model, problem-centered instruction primarily focused on questions of fact (one-system questions), questions for which there is only one right answer (because we have a system in place for answering them). And when facing a complicated question with better and worse answers, students often reasoned poorly. These "solutions" they came up with were often poorly supported because the students lacked perspective in reasoning whenever they did not have a fixed procedure to follow.
In contrast, the new model focuses, not on questions of fact (though of course students must master questions of fact), but primarily on questions that require students to make reasoned judgments (multi-system questions). Why? Because complex problems, the type they will face when they enter the workplace, inherently call for high quality judgments between conflicting systems or approaches.
In the new model, then, students learn to explicitly identify the kind of problem or question they are dealing with (Richard Paul, 1995). Is it a one-system question (with one correct answer)? Is it a no-system question (with every answer a matter of pure subjective preference)? Or is it a multi-system question (with better and worse answers)? Let us now look more closely at these three kinds of questions.
 The first type of question involves one established system or procedure for obtaining the answer. The objective when dealing with questions in this category is to determine what that established method is, and then to follow the identified method to the answer. These are questions of fact, or knowledge. Examples are: What is the boiling point of lead? What is the differential of this equation? What is the chemical composition of air? How does the motherboard on this type of computer work?"
The old mode of instruction focuses predominantly on these one-system questions and treats them as ends themselves. In the new model questions of fact are mastered in relation to questions that call for reasoned judgment. Thus students learn the value of being able to find information; they learn various ways to locate facts; but they learn to do so primarily as part of the reasoning process when dealing with complex questions.
The second type of question, questions involving preference, are questions for which there are as many right answers as there are individual responses. Examples of this sort of question include "What is your favorite color of cabinet? What type of food do you like best? Would you rather wear blue jeans or sweat pants? What kind of job do you enjoy best? Answers to this second type of question cannot be critiqued since they involve pure subjective taste. Thus in the new mode of instruction students learn that answers to such questions cannot be assessed. Any answer is as good as any other answer. As a result we avoid focusing attention on these dead-end questions. We set the purely subjective aside to deal with those matters where judgment and quality of reasoning are essential.
The third type of question is, as we have seen, that which is dominant in the new economic realities. These are questions to which there is no one right or wrong answer, though evidence and reasoning are essential to the plausible answering of them. There is no one established way of thinking about them, though how we think about them has important implications in our economic lives. These are questions which frequently call for crucial answers.
Our economic success often depends upon them. They are questions that require our best thinking--because they require thinking within multiple points of view and marshaling information in the best way we can. Questions in this category include: "What are the best methods for reducing crime in America? What is our best strategy for meeting the new product line introduced by our competitor? How can we best invest this capital? What is the best strategy for increasing our productivity level while also improving the quality of our products? How can we improve morale at the same time that we downsize?"
Being able to routinely distinguish one-system, non-system, and multi-system questions illustrates one important way in which students must learn to take command of the various component structures in their thought. If they don’t achieve intellectual control over the problem they are trying to solve, they will not be able to solve it. We cannot solve problems we don’t understand.
In the new model, then, we explicitly teach students to take their thinking apart, to take charge of the structures in which they are reasoning, and we do this in conjunction with students learning a set of universal standards for assessing thinking. Let us now turn to the question of standards.




Dimension Three:
 Teaching Students Universal Intellectual Standards
In the third dimension, we recognize the need for universal standards for thought. The old model of instruction emphasized domain-specific technical criteria. "Perform this procedure in this way." "Answer 90% of the test questions correctly." "Follow these directions." "Demonstrate that you can apply these mathematical formulas."
The new approach, concerned with holding students responsible for their thinking in a generalizable way emphasizes broad-based, not domain-specific intellectual standards. Thus students come to understand what it means to think and to act as persons who are intellectually responsible for their performance--in general, not just in standardized technical problems they can predict. For example, the new model emphasizes the following:
1.to think well, one must think clearly

2.to think well, one must think accurately

3.to think well, one must think precisely

4.to think well, one must think relevantly

5.to think well one must think deeply

6.to think well, one must think broad-mindedly

7.to think well, one must think logically.
In the old model students often learned how to function competently only in a narrow job and with standard problems, while their thinking in general remained largely undisciplined. Outside a narrow sphere of performance they often thought unclearly, inaccurately, imprecisely, irrelevantly, superficially, and illogically. Needless to say this did not auger well for their performance outside their special competence.
As long as much of student thinking remains subconscious--as it does for most students (since they lack the skills to bring it to their conscious minds for scrutiny)--it tends to operate with "standards" that cannot consciously be justified. In fact, if we pay special attention to how students decide to accept or reject ideas, we will find that most students use standards that are actually anti-intellectual in nature. They use standards that emerge from primitive human drives, standards that subconsciously control their thinking and leave their thinking deeply flawed.
Here are the most common standards that students use (unfortunately, they are precisely the ones most undisciplined thinkers use). They are:
1.believe an idea if it agrees with what you already believe (an egocentric standard)

2.believe an idea if it agrees with what your friends or associates believe (a sociocentric standard)

3.believe an idea if you want to believe it (an exercise in willful self-deception).
Think of the way the brass of Detroit auto reasoned during the 15 years that they were losing market share to the Japanese: "These Japanese cars are nothing but a fad. Americans don’t want small economic cars. They want style and size and comfort. We just need to outlast the fad, not change our basic manufacturing strategies." It wasn’t until Detroit went virtually bankrupt that they considered an alternative line of thought. Their agreement with each other, their tendency to believe what they wanted to believe, were the ruling standards for their thinking. They invested billions in lousy thinking. And the US economy suffered a severe blow because of it.
Obviously, these are not standards for thinking that we want to foster in our students. Yet the old model fails to teach students how to recognize when these standards are at work in their thinking.
In the new model, however, students are taught to guard against natural human tendencies to believe what agrees with them or what they want to believe. Instead they learn to how to maximize objectivity in assessment, however painful the "truth" might be. Without this discipline, students will be frustrated in complicated or messy problems and will retreat to comfortable beliefs. Accordingly, instead of exercising self-determination in their thinking, students become victims of their thinking. In the old model, students don’t control their thinking; their thinking controls them.
Conclusion
It is now undebatable that workers of tomorrow must have basic critical thinking abilities if they are to function well in the complex world of accelerating change that now faces them. They must have the intellectual skills to competently address new questions and problems inherent in the new emerging world of work. This involves the ability to take thinking apart and analyze it, as well as to consistently apply intellectual standards to it. They must be able to accurately and consistently assess their thinking, to determine, their own strengths and weaknesses and project strategies for continual improvement.
Since two-year colleges have historically led the higher education community in preparing students for the world of work, they are in a unique position to take the lead once again. But this involves commitment and leadership on the part of the faculty and the administration.
The shift from the old to the new model is not a casual or easy shift. It will be years before it occurs at most four-year colleges and universities--where teaching effectiveness is a secondary factor. It will not occur easily at any level of education.
It will certainly not occur at the community college level simply because community college faculty read a general argument for the new model such as this article constitutes. One might begin with such an article. But one does not end with it. Faculty need quality Inservice in the design of instruction based on new model criteria. They need paradigms. They need examples. They need practice. And they need to be encouraged and rewarded for designing new model classes.
If we are to make the changes necessary for our students to compete in a highly complex global market, the band-aid, quick fix approach to transforming our educational systems must be abandoned. With leadership and determination the new community college of the future can and will emerge. But that leadership and determination will not be successfully generated unless we are willing to do the intellectual work necessary to transform our own thinking. We need to think our own way into new conceptions about what teaching and learning are all about. We need bona fide critical thinking. As Richard Paul has said:
“What we can be sure of is that the persuasiveness of the argument for critical thinking will only grow year by year, day by day -- for the logic of the argument is simply the only prudent response to the accelerating change, to the increasing complexity of our world. No gimmick, no crafty substitute, can be found for the cultivation of quality thinking. The quality of our lives can only become more and more obviously the product of the quality of the thinking we use to create them (p. 16)...Our students deserve at least a fighting chance to compete, to rise to the challenge of the day (p.5).”
All quotes by Richard Paul in this article are taken from the book by Paul, R. (1995). Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World. Dillon Beach: Foundation For Critical Thinking
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Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Commun
Sublinks:
Critical Thinking and the Social Studies Teacher
Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education
Ethics Without Indoctrination
Engineering Reasoning
Accelerating Change
Applied Disciplines: A Critical Thinking Model for Engineering
Global Change: Why C.T. is Essential To the Community College Mission
Natural Egocentric Dispositions
Diversity: Making Sense of It Through Critical Thinking
Critical Thinking, Moral Integrity and Citizenship
Critical Thinking and Emotional Intelligence



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Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education


Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education
Linda Elder and Richard Paul

Throughout their lives, students will face a broad range of ethical issues and questions. Thus it is essential that they learn the foundational ethical principles and understandings requisite to skilled ethical reasoning. 

The ultimate basis for ethics is clear: Much human behavior has consequences for the welfare of others.  We are capable of acting toward others in such a way as to increase or decrease the quality of their lives. We are capable of helping or harming. What is more, we are theoretically capable of understanding when we are doing the one and when the other. This is so because we have the capacity to put ourselves imaginatively in the place of others and recognize how we would be affected if someone were to act toward us as we are acting toward others.

The proper role of ethical reasoning is to highlight acts of two kinds: those that enhance the well being of others—that warrant our praise—and those that harm or diminish the well-being of others—and thus warrant our criticism. Developing one’s ethical reasoning abilities is crucial because there is in human nature a strong tendency toward egotism, prejudice, self-justification, and self-deception. These pathological tendencies are exacerbated by powerful ethnocentric or sociocentric influences that shape our lives. These tendencies can be actively combated only through the systematic cultivation of fair-mindedness, honesty, integrity, self-knowledge, and deep concern for the welfare of others.

Nearly everyone gives at least lip service to a common core of general ethical principles—for example, that it is morally wrong to cheat, deceive, exploit, abuse, harm, or steal from others, that everyone has an ethical responsibility to respect the rights of others, including their freedom and well-being, to help those most in need of help, to seek the common good and not merely their own self-interest and egocentric pleasures, to strive in some way to make the world more just and humane.

Unfortunately, mere verbal agreement on ethical principles will not accomplish important ethical ends nor change the world for the better. Ethical principles mean something only when manifested in behavior. They have force only when embodied in action. Yet to put them into action requires a combination of intellectual skills and ethical insights.

One ethical insight all humans need to acquire is that ethics is frequently confused with other divergent modes of thought that often leads to a failure to act ethically (while assuming oneself to be acting ethically). Skilled ethical thinkers routinely distinguish ethics from domains such as social conventions (conventional thinking), religion (theological thinking), and the law (legal thinking).

When ethics is confused with these very different modes of thinking it is not uncommon for conflicting social values and taboos to be treated as if they were universal ethical principles.

Thus, religious ideologies, social “rules,” and laws are often mistakenly taken to be inherently ethical in nature. If we were to accept this amalgamation of domains, then by implication every practice within any religious system would necessarily be ethical, every social rule ethically obligatory, and every law ethically justified.

If religion were to define ethics, we could not then judge any religious practices— for example tortur­ing unbelievers or burning them alive—as ethical. In the same way, if ethical and con­ventional thinking were one and the same, every social practice within any culture would necessarily be ethically obligatory—including Nazi Germany. We could not, then, condemn any social traditions, norms, and taboos from an ethical stand­point—however ethically bankrupt they were. What’s more, if the law defined ethics, then by implication politicians and lawyers would be experts on ethics and every law they finagled to get on the books would take on the status of an ethical truth.

It is essential, then, to differentiate ethics from modes of thinking commonly con­fused with ethics. We must remain free to critique commonly accepted social conventions, religious practices, political ideas, and laws using ethical concepts not defined by them. No one lacking this ability will become proficient in ethical reasoning.
Distinguishing Ethics From Religion
Religious variability derives from the fact that theological beliefs are intrinsically subject to debate. There are an unlimited number of alternative ways for people to conceive and account for the nature of the “spiritual.” Throughout history there have been hundreds of differing religious belief systems. These traditional ways of believing adopted by social groups or cultures often take on the force of habit and custom. They are then handed down from one generation to another. To the individuals in any given group, their particu­lar beliefs seem to them to be the ONLY way, or the only REASONABLE way, to conceive of the “divine.” They cannot see that their religious beliefs are just one set among many possible religious belief systems.

Theological reasoning answers metaphysical questions such as:
What is the origin of all things? Is there a God? Is there more than one God? If there is a God, what is his/her nature? Are there ordained divine laws expressed by God to guide our life and behavior? If so, what are these laws? How are they communicated to us? What must we do to live in keeping with the will of the divine?

Examples of Religious Beliefs Being Confused with Ethical Principles:
•Members of majority religious groups often enforce their beliefs on minorities.
•Members of religious groups often act as if their theological views are self-evidently true, scorning those who hold other views.
•Members of religious groups often fail to recognize that “sin” is a theological concept, not an ethical one. (“Sin” is theologically defined.)
•Divergent religions define sin in different ways (but often expect their views to be enforced on all others as if a matter of universal ethics).

Because beliefs about divinity and spirituality are not based in ethical concepts and principles, they are not compulsory. There is no definitive way to prove any single set of religious beliefs to the exclusion of all others. For that reason religious freedom is a human right. One can objectively prove that murder and assault are harmful, but not that non-belief in God is.

Consider this example: If a religious group were to believe that the firstborn male of every family must be sacrificed, every person in that group would think themselves ethically obligated to kill their firstborn male. Their religious beliefs would lead them to unethical behavior.

That ethical judgment must trump religious belief is shown by the undeniable fact that many persons have been tortured and/or murdered by people motivated by reli­gious zeal or conviction. Indeed religious persecution is commonplace in human history. Even today, religious persecution and religiously motivated atrocities are common­place. No religious belief as such can justify violations of basic human rights.

In short, theological beliefs cannot override ethical principles. We must turn to ethical principles to protect ourselves from intolerant and oppressive religious practices.

Distinguishing Ethics From the Law
It is important that students learn to distinguish ethics from the law. What is illegal may or may not be a matter of ethics. What is ethically obligatory may be illegal. What is unethical may be legal. There is no essential connection between ethics and the law.

Laws often emerge out of social conventions and taboos. And, because we cannot assume that social conventions are ethical, we cannot assume that human laws are ethical. The case of Oscar Wilde offers a paradigm case of social taboos and conventions guiding the law.  In 1895, Wilde was convicted of sodomy for engaging in homosexual acts, which were a felony in England at that time.  At sentencing, the judge said “It is the worst case I have ever tried…the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise to the breast of every man of honor who has heard of the details…People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame…I shall, under such circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows.  In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such as case as this.”  Wilde was sentenced to 2 years hard labor and died only a few short years after his release.

Examples of Laws Being Confused with Ethics:
•Many sexual practices (such as homosexuality) have been unjustly punished with life imprisonment or death (under the laws of one society or another).
•Many societies have enforced unjust laws based on racist views.
•Many societies have enforced laws that discriminated against women and/or children.
•Many societies have made torture and/or slavery legal.

Distinguishing Ethics From Social Conventions
To understand why people often do not reason well through ethical issues, it is essential to recognize that humans are routinely socially conditioned. We do not begin life with the ability to critique social norms and taboos. Yet unless we learn to critique the social mores and taboos imposed upon us from birth, we will accept those traditions as unquestionably “right.”

For instance, many western countries once considered slavery to be justified and desirable. It was part of social custom. Moreover, throughout history, many groups of people, including people of various nation­alities and skin colors, as well as females, children, and individuals with disabilities, have been victims of discrimination as the result of social conventions wrongly treated as ethically obligatory.

Cultural diversity derives from the fact that there are an unlimited number of alternative ways for social groups to satisfy their needs and fulfill their desires. Those traditional ways of living within a social group or culture take on the force of habit and custom. They are handed down from one generation to another. To the individuals in a given group they seem to be the only way, or the only reasonable way, to do things. And these social customs often legitimate unethical behaviors.

Schools traditionally (and unintentionally) function as apologists for conventional thought; academics often inadvertently foster confusion between conventional morality and universal ethics. In doing so they fail to lay a foundation for education that emancipates the mind. They fail to foster the intellectual skills that enable students to distinguish cultural mores from ethical precepts, social commandments from ethical truths. They, along with their students, fail to see that whenever social beliefs and taboos conflict with ethical principles, ethical principles should prevail. They fail to see categorical distinctions essential to all ethical reasoning.
     
Examples of social conventions confused with ethics:
·         Many societies have created taboos against showing various parts of the body and have severely punished those who violated them.
·         Many societies have created taboos against giving women the same rights as men.
·         Many societies have socially legitimized religious persecution.
·         Many societies have socially stigmatized interracial marriages.

Acts That are Unethical In-and-of-Themselves
For any action to be unethical, it must deny another person or creature some inalienable right. Such unethical acts include slavery, genocide, sexism, racism, murder, assault, rape, fraud, deceit, intimidation, imprisoning people for acts that are not in themselves unethical, and torturing animals.

Conclusion
Unspeakable suffering occurs because the logic of ethical reasoning is obscured in many human interactions.  Humans don’t tend to think critically about ethics, religion, ideology, social conventions and the law.  The result is that most people often fail to see how what they consider a matter of “ethics” is often not grounded in ethical principles. The categorical distinctions running through this article document some of the essential understandings indispensable for skilled ethical reasoning.  Thus much should be clear: as long as we continue to confuse these very different domains of thought, we will never have the foundations for creating a just world. 



This article can be found on the website of the Foundation for Critical Thinking: www.criticalthinking.org, published November 19, 2011

To learn more about ethical reasoning see: The Thinker’s Guide to Understanding the Foundations of Ethical Reasoning by Richard Paul and Linda Elder, 2006.



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Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education


Ethical Reasoning Essential to Education
Linda Elder and Richard Paul

Throughout their lives, students will face a broad range of ethical issues and questions. Thus it is essential that they learn the foundational ethical principles and understandings requisite to skilled ethical reasoning. 

The ultimate basis for ethics is clear: Much human behavior has consequences for the welfare of others.  We are capable of acting toward others in such a way as to increase or decrease the quality of their lives. We are capable of helping or harming. What is more, we are theoretically capable of understanding when we are doing the one and when the other. This is so because we have the capacity to put ourselves imaginatively in the place of others and recognize how we would be affected if someone were to act toward us as we are acting toward others.

The proper role of ethical reasoning is to highlight acts of two kinds: those that enhance the well being of others—that warrant our praise—and those that harm or diminish the well-being of others—and thus warrant our criticism. Developing one’s ethical reasoning abilities is crucial because there is in human nature a strong tendency toward egotism, prejudice, self-justification, and self-deception. These pathological tendencies are exacerbated by powerful ethnocentric or sociocentric influences that shape our lives. These tendencies can be actively combated only through the systematic cultivation of fair-mindedness, honesty, integrity, self-knowledge, and deep concern for the welfare of others.

Nearly everyone gives at least lip service to a common core of general ethical principles—for example, that it is morally wrong to cheat, deceive, exploit, abuse, harm, or steal from others, that everyone has an ethical responsibility to respect the rights of others, including their freedom and well-being, to help those most in need of help, to seek the common good and not merely their own self-interest and egocentric pleasures, to strive in some way to make the world more just and humane.

Unfortunately, mere verbal agreement on ethical principles will not accomplish important ethical ends nor change the world for the better. Ethical principles mean something only when manifested in behavior. They have force only when embodied in action. Yet to put them into action requires a combination of intellectual skills and ethical insights.

One ethical insight all humans need to acquire is that ethics is frequently confused with other divergent modes of thought that often leads to a failure to act ethically (while assuming oneself to be acting ethically). Skilled ethical thinkers routinely distinguish ethics from domains such as social conventions (conventional thinking), religion (theological thinking), and the law (legal thinking).

When ethics is confused with these very different modes of thinking it is not uncommon for conflicting social values and taboos to be treated as if they were universal ethical principles.

Thus, religious ideologies, social “rules,” and laws are often mistakenly taken to be inherently ethical in nature. If we were to accept this amalgamation of domains, then by implication every practice within any religious system would necessarily be ethical, every social rule ethically obligatory, and every law ethically justified.

If religion were to define ethics, we could not then judge any religious practices— for example tortur­ing unbelievers or burning them alive—as ethical. In the same way, if ethical and con­ventional thinking were one and the same, every social practice within any culture would necessarily be ethically obligatory—including Nazi Germany. We could not, then, condemn any social traditions, norms, and taboos from an ethical stand­point—however ethically bankrupt they were. What’s more, if the law defined ethics, then by implication politicians and lawyers would be experts on ethics and every law they finagled to get on the books would take on the status of an ethical truth.

It is essential, then, to differentiate ethics from modes of thinking commonly con­fused with ethics. We must remain free to critique commonly accepted social conventions, religious practices, political ideas, and laws using ethical concepts not defined by them. No one lacking this ability will become proficient in ethical reasoning.
Distinguishing Ethics From Religion
Religious variability derives from the fact that theological beliefs are intrinsically subject to debate. There are an unlimited number of alternative ways for people to conceive and account for the nature of the “spiritual.” Throughout history there have been hundreds of differing religious belief systems. These traditional ways of believing adopted by social groups or cultures often take on the force of habit and custom. They are then handed down from one generation to another. To the individuals in any given group, their particu­lar beliefs seem to them to be the ONLY way, or the only REASONABLE way, to conceive of the “divine.” They cannot see that their religious beliefs are just one set among many possible religious belief systems.

Theological reasoning answers metaphysical questions such as:
What is the origin of all things? Is there a God? Is there more than one God? If there is a God, what is his/her nature? Are there ordained divine laws expressed by God to guide our life and behavior? If so, what are these laws? How are they communicated to us? What must we do to live in keeping with the will of the divine?

Examples of Religious Beliefs Being Confused with Ethical Principles:
•Members of majority religious groups often enforce their beliefs on minorities.
•Members of religious groups often act as if their theological views are self-evidently true, scorning those who hold other views.
•Members of religious groups often fail to recognize that “sin” is a theological concept, not an ethical one. (“Sin” is theologically defined.)
•Divergent religions define sin in different ways (but often expect their views to be enforced on all others as if a matter of universal ethics).

Because beliefs about divinity and spirituality are not based in ethical concepts and principles, they are not compulsory. There is no definitive way to prove any single set of religious beliefs to the exclusion of all others. For that reason religious freedom is a human right. One can objectively prove that murder and assault are harmful, but not that non-belief in God is.

Consider this example: If a religious group were to believe that the firstborn male of every family must be sacrificed, every person in that group would think themselves ethically obligated to kill their firstborn male. Their religious beliefs would lead them to unethical behavior.

That ethical judgment must trump religious belief is shown by the undeniable fact that many persons have been tortured and/or murdered by people motivated by reli­gious zeal or conviction. Indeed religious persecution is commonplace in human history. Even today, religious persecution and religiously motivated atrocities are common­place. No religious belief as such can justify violations of basic human rights.

In short, theological beliefs cannot override ethical principles. We must turn to ethical principles to protect ourselves from intolerant and oppressive religious practices.

Distinguishing Ethics From the Law
It is important that students learn to distinguish ethics from the law. What is illegal may or may not be a matter of ethics. What is ethically obligatory may be illegal. What is unethical may be legal. There is no essential connection between ethics and the law.

Laws often emerge out of social conventions and taboos. And, because we cannot assume that social conventions are ethical, we cannot assume that human laws are ethical. The case of Oscar Wilde offers a paradigm case of social taboos and conventions guiding the law.  In 1895, Wilde was convicted of sodomy for engaging in homosexual acts, which were a felony in England at that time.  At sentencing, the judge said “It is the worst case I have ever tried…the crime of which you have been convicted is so bad that one has to put stern restraint upon one’s self to prevent one’s self from describing, in language which I would rather not use, the sentiments which must rise to the breast of every man of honor who has heard of the details…People who can do these things must be dead to all sense of shame…I shall, under such circumstances, be expected to pass the severest sentence that the law allows.  In my judgment it is totally inadequate for such as case as this.”  Wilde was sentenced to 2 years hard labor and died only a few short years after his release.

Examples of Laws Being Confused with Ethics:
•Many sexual practices (such as homosexuality) have been unjustly punished with life imprisonment or death (under the laws of one society or another).
•Many societies have enforced unjust laws based on racist views.
•Many societies have enforced laws that discriminated against women and/or children.
•Many societies have made torture and/or slavery legal.

Distinguishing Ethics From Social Conventions
To understand why people often do not reason well through ethical issues, it is essential to recognize that humans are routinely socially conditioned. We do not begin life with the ability to critique social norms and taboos. Yet unless we learn to critique the social mores and taboos imposed upon us from birth, we will accept those traditions as unquestionably “right.”

For instance, many western countries once considered slavery to be justified and desirable. It was part of social custom. Moreover, throughout history, many groups of people, including people of various nation­alities and skin colors, as well as females, children, and individuals with disabilities, have been victims of discrimination as the result of social conventions wrongly treated as ethically obligatory.

Cultural diversity derives from the fact that there are an unlimited number of alternative ways for social groups to satisfy their needs and fulfill their desires. Those traditional ways of living within a social group or culture take on the force of habit and custom. They are handed down from one generation to another. To the individuals in a given group they seem to be the only way, or the only reasonable way, to do things. And these social customs often legitimate unethical behaviors.

Schools traditionally (and unintentionally) function as apologists for conventional thought; academics often inadvertently foster confusion between conventional morality and universal ethics. In doing so they fail to lay a foundation for education that emancipates the mind. They fail to foster the intellectual skills that enable students to distinguish cultural mores from ethical precepts, social commandments from ethical truths. They, along with their students, fail to see that whenever social beliefs and taboos conflict with ethical principles, ethical principles should prevail. They fail to see categorical distinctions essential to all ethical reasoning.
     
Examples of social conventions confused with ethics:
·         Many societies have created taboos against showing various parts of the body and have severely punished those who violated them.
·         Many societies have created taboos against giving women the same rights as men.
·         Many societies have socially legitimized religious persecution.
·         Many societies have socially stigmatized interracial marriages.

Acts That are Unethical In-and-of-Themselves
For any action to be unethical, it must deny another person or creature some inalienable right. Such unethical acts include slavery, genocide, sexism, racism, murder, assault, rape, fraud, deceit, intimidation, imprisoning people for acts that are not in themselves unethical, and torturing animals.

Conclusion
Unspeakable suffering occurs because the logic of ethical reasoning is obscured in many human interactions.  Humans don’t tend to think critically about ethics, religion, ideology, social conventions and the law.  The result is that most people often fail to see how what they consider a matter of “ethics” is often not grounded in ethical principles. The categorical distinctions running through this article document some of the essential understandings indispensable for skilled ethical reasoning.  Thus much should be clear: as long as we continue to confuse these very different domains of thought, we will never have the foundations for creating a just world. 



This article can be found on the website of the Foundation for Critical Thinking: www.criticalthinking.org, published November 19, 2011

To learn more about ethical reasoning see: The Thinker’s Guide to Understanding the Foundations of Ethical Reasoning by Richard Paul and Linda Elder, 2006.



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Accelerating Change



     {This document is found in Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World, by Richard Paul, Dillon Beach: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 1995, chapter one.}

Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to trace the general implications of what are identified as the two central characteristics of the future: accelerating change and intensifying complexity. If change continues to move faster and faster, and if the changes that do occur become more and more complex, how are we to deal with the world? More specifically, how are we to understand how this change and complexity will play itself out? How are we to prepare for it? Paul and Willsen focus on the economic and educational dimensions of these questions. They lead us into and through the vision of four of our most penetrating thinkers: Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, W. Edward Deming, and Robert Heilbroner. The general thesis is that the visions of these thinkers are complementary and that collectively they provide us with a rich and pointed picture of what we must do, not because they are “visionaries,” but because they have done the profound analytic work which enables them to shed a clear light on very general patterns, all of which add up to accelerating change, intensifying complexity, and critical thinking. The chapter ends with an analysis of the implications for parenting, work, and education of the foundational fact that “the work of the future is the work of the mind, intellectual work, work that involves reasoning and intellectual self-discipline.”




The Nature of the Post-Industrial World Order
The world is swiftly changing and with each day the pace quickens. The pressure to respond intensifies. New global realities are rapidly working their way into the deepest structures of our lives: economic, social, environmental realities — realities with profound implications for teaching and learning, for business and politics, for human rights and human conflicts. These realities are becoming increasingly complex; and they all turn on the powerful dynamic of accelerating change. This chapter explores the general character of these changes and the quality of thinking necessary for effectively adapting to them.
Can we deal with incessant and accelerating change and complexity without revolutionizing our thinking? Traditionally our thinking has been designed for routine, for habit, for automation and fixed procedure. We learned how to do something once, and then we did it over and over. Learning meant becoming habituated. But what is it to learn to continually re-learn? To be comfortable with perpetual re-learning? This is a new world for us to explore, one in which the power of critical thinking to turn back on itself in continual cycles and re-cycles of self-critique is crucial.
Consider, for a moment, even a simple feature of daily life: drinking water from the tap. With the increase of pollution, the poisoning of ground water, the indirect and long-term negative consequences of even small amounts of a growing number of chemicals, how are we to judge whether or not public drinking water is safe? Increasingly governments are making decisions about how many lives to risk against the so many dollars of cost to save them. How are we to know whether the risk the government is willing to take with our lives is equivalent to our willingness to risk? This is just one of hundreds of decisions that require extraordinary thinking.
Consider also the quiet revolution that is taking place in communications. From fax machines to E-Mail, from bulletin board systems to computer delivery systems to home shopping, we are providing opportunities for people to not only be more efficient with their time, but to build invisible networks where goods, services, and ideas are exchanged with individuals the world over. But how is one to interface with this revolution? How much is one to learn and how fast? How much money should one spend on this or that new system? When is the new system cost effective? When should one wait for a newer development?
These communication innovations have re-introduced a way of life lost in the industrial revolution of the late 1800s. Farmers used to work at home, doctors’ offices were routinely downstairs from where they lived. All that is coming back, not for farmers or doctors, but for millions of service and technical professionals for whom, “I work at home,” is now a common refrain. But how are we to take these realities into account in planning our lives and careers?
Yes, technological growth brings new opportunities, new safety devices, more convenience, new lifestyles. But we must also juggle and judge work and child-care, efficiency and clogged transportation systems, expensive cars and inconvenient office space, increased specialization and increasing obsolescence. We are caught up in an increasing swirl of challenges and decisions.
These changes ask and offer much at the same time, if only we can make sense of them and put them into perspective. For example, what are we to make of altered forms of community, for community in a world of automatic tellers, home shopping, self-service, delivery services, malls, video rentals, and television? How shall we evaluate these social changes and their implications for our lives?
Or consider another facet of the accelerating change: that young people today can expect to make from four to seven career changes in their lifetimes. The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a poignant reminder of a vision from the past. Our children and students can no longer anticipate the knowledge or data that they will need on the job, because they can no longer predict the kinds of jobs that will be available or what they will entail.
What is more, even if the young could predict the general fields in which they will work, about half of the information that is current in each field will be obsolete in six years. Will people recognize which half? Will they know how to access and use it?
 Accelerating change is intermeshed with another powerful force, the increasing complexity of the problems we face. Consider, for a moment, solid waste management. This problem involves every level of government, every department: from energy to water quality, to planning, to revenues, to public health. Without a cooperative venture, without bridging the territorial domains, without overcoming the implicit adversarial process within which we currently operate, the responsible parties at each tier of government cannot even begin to solve these problems. When they do communicate, they often do not speak honestly about the issues given the human propensity to mask the limitations of one’s position and promote one’s narrow but deeply vested interests.
Consider the issues of depletion of the ozone layer, world hunger, over-population, and AIDS. Without a grasp of the elements, and internal relationships of the elements, in each of dozens of interrelating systems from specific product emissions to social incentives, from effective utilization of the media to human learning, we are adrift in a stormy sea of information. Without a grasp of the of political realities, economic pressures, scientific data on the physical environment and its changes — all of which are simultaneously changing the as well — we stand no chance of making any significant positive impact on the deterioration of the quality of life for all who share the planet.
These two characteristics, then, accelerating change and increasing complexity — with their incessant demand for a new capacity to adapt, for the now rare ability to think effectively through new problems and situations in new ways — sound the death knell for traditional methods of learning how to survive in the world in which we live. How can we adapt to reality when reality won’t give us time to master it before it changes itself, again and again, in ways we cannot anticipate? As we struggle to gain insight, let’s look more closely at the operating forces.
Robert Heilbroner, the distinguished American economist, in Twenty-First Century Capitalism, identifies capitalism as a global force that brings us “kaleidoscopic changefulness,” a “torrent of market-driven change.” As he illustrates in example after example, “If capitalism is anything, it is a social order in constant change — and beyond that, change that seems to have a direction, an underlying principle of motion, a logic.” The logic, however, is the logic of “creative destruction, the unpredictable displacement of one process or product by another at the hands of giant enterprise” (p. 20).
Furthermore, along with kaleidoscopic change, along with the continual social transformations that follow from those changes, come “both wealth and misery,” development and damage, a “two-edged sword” that makes instability permanent in unpredicted and unpredictable forms. Basic change continually destabilizes the system at the micro-level, making for multiple imbalances and upheavals. The complexity and speed of change means that we shall always have to make unpredictable adjustments to both the upsides and downsides that result from this upheaval, for we cannot hope to predict the myriad of micro-level system changes that are continually emerging and putting pressure on the system at the macro level.
We can no longer rely on the past to be the guide for the future. Technology will continually race ahead, creating links that make the world smaller and smaller. New opportunities will continually emerge but within them are embedded new problems, hence the need for acute readiness and disciplined ingenuity. At every step along the way, however, polished, satiny voices will tempt us astray with slick, simplistic messages that appear to guide us back to the “tried and true.” Often, these voices in fact coax us into policies and practices that continually sacrifice our long-term interests to someone’s short-term gain. In business, education, and politics, the same sirens echo.
Many American business and labor leaders have yet to come to terms with these realities. They yearn for a world of stability in which they can play a predictable game in a predictable way. As Laura Tyson, Chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors has put it,
… the vast majority of American companies … [continue] to opt for traditional hierarchical work organizations that … [make] few demands on the skills of their workers. In fact, most American companies interviewed by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce continue to prefer this approach, which dooms most American workers to a low-wage future. If American workers are to look forward to anything more than low-wage employment, changes in work organization are required to upgrade their skills and productivity so that American companies can afford to pay higher wages and still compete in world markets. (“Failing Our Youth: America’s K–12 Education,” p. 52)
What our businesses are failing to change is what European and Japanese companies are changing: namely, “making their high-wage labor more productive not simply by investing in more equipment but by organizing their workers in ways that … [upgrade] their skills.” World-class, internationally competitive companies recognize the need to play a new game and have re-organized themselves accordingly. As Tyson explains,
High productivity work-place organizations depend on workers who can do more than read, write, and do simple arithmetic, and who bring more to their jobs than reliability and a good attitude. In such organizations, workers are asked to use judgment and make decisions rather than to merely follow directions. Management layers disappear as workers take over many of the tasks that others used to do — from quality control to production scheduling. Tasks formerly performed by dozens of unskilled individuals are turned over to a much smaller number of skilled individuals. Often, teams of workers are required to monitor complicated computer-controlled production equipment, to interpret computer output, to perform statistical quality control techniques, and to repair complex and sensitive equipment. (p. 53) [our emphasis]
These new kinds of workers, of course, are not asked merely to “use judgment and make decisions,” rather they are asked to use good judgment and make well-thought-out decisions. How will workers acquire these fundamental abilities to think deeply and well? Are educators able to “make meaning” out of these exhortations of our leaders?
Bold changes in business organization and practices require parallel changes in education. Yet the U.S. public school systems, like most U.S. businesses, remain mired in the past, focused on lower order skills, and unresponsive to the need for higher order abilities. Again, as Laura Tyson puts it, “[Higher-order tasks] … require higher-order language, math, scientific, and reasoning skills that America’s K–12 education system is not providing.”
Our students deserve at least a fighting chance to compete, to rise to the challenges of the day. Reconstructing and adapting our business and educational systems to teach our managers as well as our teachers and administrators how to create these higher order workplaces and classrooms, and then to expect them to do so in the ordinary course of their professional obligations, is our first major challenge. Today, at every level, we are failing this test, failing our students and workers, jeopardizing our future. What is missing is a genuine sense of what accelerating change entails and a shared public vision of the need for fundamental changes. Many of our leading economic analysts are struggling to create just such a new frame of reference within which we can come to terms with the new imperatives.

The Vision of Robert Reich: The Thinking of Workers as the New Capital
Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, in his seminal book, The Work of Nations, offers a shocking perspective. No longer will economies be tied to the fate of national corporations. No longer will we be sheltered by the power of our enormous industrial complex, our major corporations. No longer can we say, “What is good for General Motors is good for the United States!” The new form of “wealth” will no longer principally reside in the number of dollars in American pockets. Rather it will reside in the quality of the minds of our workers. As Reich puts it,
We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, or at least not as we have come to understand that concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights. (p. 3)
The changes triggered and fueled by new opportunities will bring an economy . . . replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions, and unknown means of putting them together — mastery of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income. Nor, importantly, is it even necessary . . . What is more valuable is the capacity to effectively and creatively use the knowledge. (p. 182)
Routinely, jobs and production, the income that those jobs generate, and its multiplying effects in commerce, are leaping national boundaries, seeking optimum conditions for competition. We are facing competition for the production work that Americans have habitually taken as their birthright. The competitors are everywhere, as growing pressures of overpopulation and environmental problems make more people willing to work for lower wages and more governments willing to offer incentives to incoming business.
Certainly, many industries are still located here in the United States; however, there is a hemorrhage of routine production work that is moving to Mexico, to Asia, to Central and South America where workers are able to produce the same product for international markets at a significant savings to the organization. U.S. workers are bewildered and afraid, watching their standard of living decline with every year.
 In the emerging global economy, even the most impressive of positions in the most prestigious of organizations is vulnerable to worldwide competition if it entails easily replicated routines. The only true competitive advantage lies in skill in solving, identifying, and brokering new problems. (p. 184)
Reich claims that the distinguishing characteristic of workers who will retain their jobs will be the ability to “add value” to the production process. This translates into being able to identify and solve problems at every level relative to the job function. It means taking initiative and responsibility for the continuous improvement of production and efficiency, from the shop floor to the executive suite. To the extent that our labor force can shift into a cooperative venture with management, sharing responsibility for enhanced performance and production, jobs are more likely to be retained within our national boundaries.
The possession of capital will not in itself be a sure source of national wealth because American capital, as all other “national” capital, will be drawn to and invested in the nations where the work forces produce the highest level of return. Profit will stem from successful problem solving and brokering. Reich identifies a spiral wherein increasing opportunities for problem solving will provide the fodder for increasing our workers’ capacity to solve more and more complex problems. Mastery of each new task requires new learning, thus enhancing each worker’s capacity to contribute to the next new task.
Enhancing our capacity to solve problems will also produce more job opportunities, and up the spiral we will march as our workers continue to become better at solving the problems we face and continue to expand our inventories of skills and experience. The effectiveness and quality of our workers’ thinking will drive us up the spiral, and will provide the basis for the wealth of the nation.
But do our workers and managers see this spiral? Do we see that it is the effectiveness and quality of our thinking that enables us to climb it? What is patently clear is that the spiral flows both up and down. What is unclear is whether we have the vision and determination to reverse our current course. Assuming we do have the will, we still need to know how to proceed.
Reich identifies four components of the kind of critical thinking that the highly-paid workers of today and the future will increasingly need to master: 1) abstraction, 2) system thinking, 3) experimentation and testing, and 4) collaboration. He calls the critical thinkers in possession of these basic abilities “symbolic analysts.” Let us look briefly at how Reich characterizes each of these four generic abilities.
Command of Abstractions
The capacity for abstraction — for discovering patterns and meanings — is, of course, the very essence of symbolic analysis, in which reality must be simplified so that it can be understood and manipulated in new ways… Every innovative scientist, lawyer, engineer, designer, management consultant, screenwriter, or advertiser is continuously searching for new ways to represent reality which will be more compelling or revealing than the old…. [But] for most children in the United States and around the world, formal education entails just the opposite kind of learning. Rather than construct meanings for themselves, meanings are imposed upon them. (pp. 229–230)
Thinking Within Systems
The education of the symbolic analyst emphasizes system thinking. Rather than teach students how to solve a problem that is presented to them, they are taught to examine why the problem arises and how it is connected to other problems. Learning how to travel from one place to another by following a prescribed route is one thing; learning the entire terrain so that you can find shortcuts to wherever you may want to go is quite another. (p. 231)
Testing Ideas
Instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. The student is taught to get behind the data — to ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, how they were deduced, and how they might be contradicted. The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices. The symbolic-analytic mind is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative. (p. 230)
Learning to Collaborate and Communicate
… in America’s best classrooms … the emphasis has shifted. Instead of individual achievement and competition, the focus is on group learning. Students learn to articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they identify and find answers. They learn how to seek and accept criticism from peers, solicit help, and give credit to others. They also learn to negotiate — to explain their own needs, to discern what others need and view things from others’ perspectives. (p. 233)
How many critical thinkers (symbolic analysts) will we have the foresight to develop? For each student we fail to reach, we create an economic dependent; for each student we help to possess the requisite abilities and traits, we create a producer who can carry not only himself or herself, but those dependents inevitable in any society. How urgent do we perceive the problem to be? How clearly do we understand the problem and its dimensions?
The Vision of Lester Thurow:
 Two Forms of Capitalism at War in a World of Economic Revolutions
The world that Lester Thurow looks out upon is a world of multiple revolutions: a green revolution, a materials-science revolution, a telecommunications-computer-transportation-logistics revolution. These revolutions require fundamental changes in all economies around the world. We live in a multi-polar world: the global economy is no longer pivoting solely around the United States as it did in the fifties and sixties.
As Thurow sees it, “Nowhere are the necessary changes going to be harder to make than in the United States, for in the past century it has been the most successful economy in the world.” (Head to Head, p. 16) Our tendency, Thurow believes, will be to continue the strategies that brought us success in the past, even though those strategies no longer fit a “multi-polar” world.
For example, military power is now a distinct disadvantage rather than an advantage, a drain on the national treasury and a limitation on investments necessary for competition. Here are the new questions that in Thurow’s view can be used to measure world economic strength.
Who can make the best products? What expands their standards of living most rapidly? Who has the best-educated and best-skilled work force in the world? Who is the world’s leader in investment — plant and equipment, research and development, infrastructure? Who organizes best? Whose institutions — government, education, business — are world leaders in efficiency? (pp. 23–24)
Much of Thurow’s argument is based on a distinction between the two forms of capitalism currently in competition for world leadership: communitarian and individualistic capitalism. In every way, Thurow argues, it is clear that communitarian capitalism (such as in Germany and Japan) wins out over individualistic capitalism (such as in U.S. and Great Britain). This is reflected in many statistics including those of the World Economic Forum relating to American, German, and Japanese management (p. 162). Thurow sums up the problem as follows:
Japan and Germany, the countries that are outperforming America in international trade, do not have less government or more motivated individuals. They are countries noted for their careful organization of teams — teams that involve workers and managers, teams that involve suppliers and customers, teams that involve government and business…. But American mythology extols only the individual — the Lone Ranger or Rambo…. History is littered with the wrecks of countries whose mythologies were more important than reality. (p. 298)
In essence, Thurow’s analysis calls for a transformed American global view in which we recognize the obsolescence of some of our most fundamental traditional assumptions and the need to shift our world-view — to make no less than a fundamental intellectual paradigm shift.
But isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that has never put a premium on the ability to think critically? Isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that historically has been able to solve its problems with sheer hard work and physical courage? Isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that believes deeply in the tried and true, that has been conditioned to think of itself as leading not following and as being the most progressive, as being always number one?
Thurow nowhere discusses how this shift is to occur, how the electorate is to be persuaded into such a radical re-orientation. We tend to seek security in the familiar, in the established, in the traditional: if we don’t find it immediately, we look harder, but in the same places! Since most Americans have not been prepared by their education to do the requisite critical thinking that would support a paradigm shift such as Thurow suggests, how are they to do it?
If Thurow is right in his analysis of world economic conditions, then it will not be sufficient for a small minority of highly paid workers to learn to think critically as “symbolic analysts.” It will not be enough for a few to be comfortable with abstractions, to be able to think in terms of alternative systems, to test ideas for their strengths, and to recognize the value of collaboration. But here, again, is the most pressing problem of the day: How are we to persuade educators, how are we to persuade citizens, how are we to persuade parents that a new economic era is dawning? How are we to persuade the general public, which itself has not learned to think critically, that it is now in our collective national interest to set as our first priority the development of critical thinking abilities and traits in all of our children?









The Vision of W. Edwards Deming:
 Everyone a Critical Thinker Contributing to Continuous Improvement
W. Edwards Deming, the American marvel who, after WWII, designed the highly successful Japanese style of management and production, built his whole approach on the assumption that the most important asset of any company is the capacity of the individuals in it to use their ability to think critically to improve their collective performance. Success can be found, in his view, in the ability to devise structures that systematically encourage and reward the critique and improvement of process. He therefore established a system of interrelated networks of “workers and managers” (quality control circles, so called) who use “critical reflection in a formal but unthreatening setting so as to establish what it is good to do.” (Holt, p. 383)
 When procedures are designed to bring the maximum degree of constructive critical thinking to bear on the problems of production, virtually everyone has a potential contribution to make. The quality of the contribution will not be a function of the worker’s position in the hierarchy, but the quality of the critical thinking he or she brings to bear on the problem. This, again, requires the paradigm shift that American businesses seem reluctant to make.
Unfortunately, though Deming is now popular and much has been written about the Deming way and “total quality management,” most writings emphasize the “techniques” and “procedures” of Deming while leaving out the critical thinking they require to succeed. They have tried to “formalize” Deming, to reduce Deming to a series of procedures and charts. The inevitable result is a caricature of Deming: Total Quality Control without the “quality.” Only excellence in thinking can produce genuine, continuous improvement in quality, and excellence in thinking cannot be produced with simplistic procedures and slogans.
But we are still captive of a traditional American assumption that might be expressed as follows: “Every idea of importance can be expressed simply and learned easily. The true challenges of life are to be found in everyday hard work and extraordinary courage and neither of those require deep or ‘intellectual’ thinking.”
The necessary paradigm shifts, however, do entail the cultivation of critical thinking across the work force, up and down the lines of labor and management, across industries, across educational levels, and into the everyday discussions of national and international issues. This shift is painfully against the American grain, contrary to our traditional folk wisdom, and incompatible with much current thinking of both business and labor leaders.
The Vision of Robert Heilbroner: The Challenge of Large-Scale Disorder
Robert Heilbroner argues, as do Reich and Thurow, that though capitalism will be dominant in the 21st Century, there will be serious conflicts between opposing forms of capitalism. As a result of these conflicts, a new and perplexing dimension to the picture will emerge: the challenge of “macro-disorder,” of economy-wide and world-wide problems arising from the market mechanism following its own logic without making critical adjustments. This problem calls for solutions we have yet to think through. He calls this problem that of negative “externalities,” of market failures that have large-scale, and to date uncontrolled, negative consequences.
 Addressing these large-scale problems requires a new brand of both leadership and followership. We need leaders who become comfortable talking about and thinking through complexities. We need “followers” with the thoughtful ability and patience to grasp the very complexities being explained. Here are some of the large-scale problems that Heilbroner has in mind:
The overcutting of forests, the overfishing of the seas, the over-consumption of gasoline . . .  the indeterminacy of the outlook for investment and for technology; the unequal distribution of incomes; the volatility of credit; the tendency towards monopoly; over-regulation; the technological displacement of labor and the technological impetus towards cartelization; the inflationary tendencies of a successful economy and the depressive tendencies of an unsuccessful one; the vacillation between optimism and pessimism . . . the approach of ecological barriers . . .  the internationalizing tendency of capital that continues to outpace the defensive powers of individual governments. (p. 104)
He summarizes our situation as follows:
… the problems of capitalist disorder — too many to recite, too complex in their origins to take up one at a time . . . arise from the workings of the system . . . The problems must be addressed by the assertion of political will . . .  the undesired dynamics of the economic sphere must be contained, redressed, or redirected by the only agency capable of asserting a counter-force to that of the economic sphere. It is the government. (pp. 108–109)
The unanswered questions are, “Who or what is going to direct governments to make rational decisions in the long-term public interest? Where are we to turn to find this new kind of leader? How are we to cultivate the new kind of electorate?”
If the electorates in the various countries do not learn to think critically about large and vexing questions in the environment, in the economy, in health care and overpopulation, it is likely that government policies will be directed by small groups whose short-range interests easily triumph over long-range public good. We are facing basic problems in our capacity to govern ourselves. But all government is finally government made up of people, and people can rise only to the height of their own ability. The crucial issue is, “Will we develop the thinking abilities and intellectual traits of our citizens to a level that will be sufficient for survival?”
The Challenge of the Future
The world of the 21st Century — virtually all commentators agree — will see intensifying economic competition between forms of capitalism. Governmental, economic, social, and environmental problems will become increasingly complex and interdependent. Basic causes will be both global and national. The forces to be understood and controlled will be corporate, national, trans-national, cultural, religious, economic, and environmental, all intricately intertwined. Critical thinking will become a survival need, an external imperative for every nation and for every individual who must survive on his or her own talents, abilities, and traits.
A battle for economic vitality is being fought. Yet consider how unprepared we have been, and continue to be, for that battle. Consider the size of our national debt, the decay of our infrastructure. Consider the intensification of social divisions and divisiveness, the obsolescence of our systems of public education. Consider our traditional but increasingly dangerous assumption that the solutions to our problems lie in a dependence on traditional wisdom. Consider our traditional anti-intellectualism, our traditional parochialism. Can we free ourselves from our own narrow modes of thinking?
Can we accept the fact of accelerating change and complexity? Can we develop intellectual humility and flexibility? Can we develop faith in reason as a tool of discovery? Can we learn to think within points of view other than our own? Can we accept that we are no longer the dominant economic force in the world? Can we learn to think in the long-term and not simply in terms of short-term advantages? Can we begin to make decisions that are in the long-range interest of our children and their well-being? Can we become habitual thinkers rather than reactors and learn to continually inform our action with deep thought? These are the challenges we face. How we respond to them will determine our national fate.
Implications
What, then, do we need to do?
 As a society, our challenge is to recognize that the work of the future is the work of the mind, intellectual work, work that involves reasoning and intellectual self-discipline. Our challenge is to demonstrate intellectual courage in facing our traditional indifference to the development of our minds, our traditional arrogance in assuming that our common sense will always provide the answers, and that our example will always lead the world. We are unaccustomed to this kind of challenge.
We are uncomfortable with things intellectual. The very word smacks of subversive, egghead, ivory tower, out of touch, impractical, unrealistic. Our collective mindset is now working against us and we must own that fact. We need to “discover,” and then genuinely explore in depth this whole notion of substantive critical thinking, of thinking based on intellectual discipline and standards. We need to transform our schools, our businesses, and our lives accordingly. Are we willing to evaluate our own thinking? Are we willing to set ideology aside? Are we willing to re-think our most basic thinking?
To date, we are still under the sway of the misconception that thinking more or less “takes care of itself,” that simply by studying “hard” subjects or “concentrating” we can think well. In general, we still treat knowledge as something that can be given to us and inserted into our minds by memory alone. We must begin now to set ourselves a course that will take many, many years to reach.

1) We must parent differently. We must respond differently to our children’s “Why?” questions. We must not give them short didactic answers, but must encourage them to conjecture as to the answers. We must call more attention to the extent of our own ignorance and not try to convince our children that adults have good answers for most of their questions.
We must dialogue more with our children about complexities in their lives and in ours. We must help them to discover their own capacity to figure things out, to reason through situations. We must hold them responsible to think and not simply to rotely respond. We must step more into their points of view and help them to step more into the points of view of others. We must help them to identify their own assumptions, clarify their emerging concepts, question their habitual inferences. We must raise our children so that critical thinking becomes an integral part of their everyday lives. They must learn to accept its responsibility and come to discover its power and challenge.
2) We must work differently. We must bring the reality of cooperative critical thinking into the workplace in a thorough way. This means that we must abandon quick-fix strategies and recognize the counterfeits of substantial change. We must become aware of the difference, for example, between the jargon of “Total Quality Management” (which we now have in abundance) and the reality (which we almost entirely lack).
Both managers and workers need to learn how to begin to think in a new way: we must learn how to discipline our thinking to a new level of clarity, precision, relevance, depth, and coherence. CEO’s need to learn how to think within alternative models of how to organize and run businesses. Leaders in industry need to learn to broaden their perspectives and think about the long-range interests of the economy and not simply about short-range, vested interests of their businesses. Labor leaders need to concentrate more on support for programs that cultivate broad-based job skills and abilities, that emphasize the basic thinking skills of workers, and less on immediate bread and butter issues.
We must each take it upon ourselves to become lifelong learners, searching for ways to continuously upgrade our reasoning skills, our critical reading skills, our ability and propensity to enter into the points of view of others. Complex problems have many facets, and intellectual humility requires that we become used to exploring multiple perspectives before we make a decision. No more “Ready!… Fire!… Aim!”
3) We must educate differently. We can no longer afford the high cost of educators who have few or no critical thinking skills, and little or no motivation to develop them. Teachers and administrators who do not themselves think critically, cannot design changes in curriculum and instruction that foster critical thinking. We must come to terms with the most fundamental problem in education today and that is “the blind leading the blind.” Many educators do not realize that they are functionally blind to the demands of our post-industrial world.


As CEO and Chairman of Apple Computer, John Sculley, Has Put It
In the new economy, strategic resources no longer just come out of the ground. The strategic resources are ideas and information that come out of our minds.
 The result: as a nation, we have gone from being resource-rich in the old economy to resource-poor in the new economy almost overnight! Our public education has not successfully made the shift from teaching the memorization of facts to achieving the learning of critical thinking skills. We are still trapped in a K–12 public education system which is preparing our youth for jobs that no longer exist.
Is There Room for Any Optimism?
Yet there is room for optimism, but only under certain conditions. We have the theoretical foundation and expertise to bring critical thinking to our children, but do we have the vision and the will? If we do, we have an ace in the hole. What Deming did not anticipate was the opportunity of systematically enhancing the critical thinking of the workers as well as the students in our schools, and the competitive advantage that this would provide.
Those countries with the foresight to systematically cultivate the critical thinking of their citizens of all ages, through the educational systems in schools and the workplace, will enjoy a significant competitive advantage over countries that do not make this effort. This is particularly true when this foresight extends to emphasizing high-quality, Deming-style production models. At present, no country in the world systematically fosters critical thinking. Opportunities await those nations who can see the potential to invest intensely in this specific effort.
What we can be sure of is that the persuasiveness of the argument for critical thinking will only grow year by year, day by day — for the logic of the argument is simply the only prudent response to the accelerating change, to the increasing complexity of our world. No gimmick, no crafty substitute, can be found for the cultivation of quality thinking. The quality of our lives can only become more and more obviously the product of the quality of the thinking we use to create them.
Critical thinking is ancient, but until now its practice was for the elite minority, for the few. But the few, in possession of superior power of disciplined thought, used it as one might only expect, to advance the interests of the few. We can never expect the few to become the long-term benevolent caretakers of the many.
The many must become privy to the superior intellectual abilities, discipline, and traits of the traditional privileged few. Progressively, the power and accessibility of critical thinking will become more and more apparent to more and more people, particularly to those who have had limited access to the educational opportunities available to the fortunate few.
The only question is how long and how painful the process will be and what we shall sacrifice of the public good in the meanwhile. How many of our citizens will live lives unemployed and unemployable in the post-industrial age?
We must sooner or later abandon the traditional attempt to teach our fellow citizens what to think. Such efforts cannot prepare us for the real world we must, in fact, face. We must concentrate instead on teaching ourselves how to think, thus freeing us to think for ourselves, critically, fairmindedly, and deeply. We have no choice, not in the long haul, not in the face of the irrepressible logic of accelerating change and increasing complexity.
References
Holt, R. The Educational Consequences of W. Edwards Deming. Phi Delta Kappan. Jan. 1993.
Heilbroner, Robert. Twenty-First Century Capitalism. House of Anansi Press, Limited, Concord, Ontario. 1992.
Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations. Vintage Books, New York, NY. 1992.
Sculley, John. Remarks to then President-Elect Clinton, December, 1992.
Thurow, Lester. Head to Head. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, NY. 1992.
Tyson, Laura D’Andrea. Failing Our Youth: America’s K–12 Education. New
 Perspectives Quarterly. edited by Nathan Gordels. Winter, 1993.

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Accelerating Change



     {This document is found in Critical Thinking: How to Prepare Students for a Rapidly Changing World, by Richard Paul, Dillon Beach: Foundation for Critical Thinking, 1995, chapter one.}

Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to trace the general implications of what are identified as the two central characteristics of the future: accelerating change and intensifying complexity. If change continues to move faster and faster, and if the changes that do occur become more and more complex, how are we to deal with the world? More specifically, how are we to understand how this change and complexity will play itself out? How are we to prepare for it? Paul and Willsen focus on the economic and educational dimensions of these questions. They lead us into and through the vision of four of our most penetrating thinkers: Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, W. Edward Deming, and Robert Heilbroner. The general thesis is that the visions of these thinkers are complementary and that collectively they provide us with a rich and pointed picture of what we must do, not because they are “visionaries,” but because they have done the profound analytic work which enables them to shed a clear light on very general patterns, all of which add up to accelerating change, intensifying complexity, and critical thinking. The chapter ends with an analysis of the implications for parenting, work, and education of the foundational fact that “the work of the future is the work of the mind, intellectual work, work that involves reasoning and intellectual self-discipline.”




The Nature of the Post-Industrial World Order
The world is swiftly changing and with each day the pace quickens. The pressure to respond intensifies. New global realities are rapidly working their way into the deepest structures of our lives: economic, social, environmental realities — realities with profound implications for teaching and learning, for business and politics, for human rights and human conflicts. These realities are becoming increasingly complex; and they all turn on the powerful dynamic of accelerating change. This chapter explores the general character of these changes and the quality of thinking necessary for effectively adapting to them.
Can we deal with incessant and accelerating change and complexity without revolutionizing our thinking? Traditionally our thinking has been designed for routine, for habit, for automation and fixed procedure. We learned how to do something once, and then we did it over and over. Learning meant becoming habituated. But what is it to learn to continually re-learn? To be comfortable with perpetual re-learning? This is a new world for us to explore, one in which the power of critical thinking to turn back on itself in continual cycles and re-cycles of self-critique is crucial.
Consider, for a moment, even a simple feature of daily life: drinking water from the tap. With the increase of pollution, the poisoning of ground water, the indirect and long-term negative consequences of even small amounts of a growing number of chemicals, how are we to judge whether or not public drinking water is safe? Increasingly governments are making decisions about how many lives to risk against the so many dollars of cost to save them. How are we to know whether the risk the government is willing to take with our lives is equivalent to our willingness to risk? This is just one of hundreds of decisions that require extraordinary thinking.
Consider also the quiet revolution that is taking place in communications. From fax machines to E-Mail, from bulletin board systems to computer delivery systems to home shopping, we are providing opportunities for people to not only be more efficient with their time, but to build invisible networks where goods, services, and ideas are exchanged with individuals the world over. But how is one to interface with this revolution? How much is one to learn and how fast? How much money should one spend on this or that new system? When is the new system cost effective? When should one wait for a newer development?
These communication innovations have re-introduced a way of life lost in the industrial revolution of the late 1800s. Farmers used to work at home, doctors’ offices were routinely downstairs from where they lived. All that is coming back, not for farmers or doctors, but for millions of service and technical professionals for whom, “I work at home,” is now a common refrain. But how are we to take these realities into account in planning our lives and careers?
Yes, technological growth brings new opportunities, new safety devices, more convenience, new lifestyles. But we must also juggle and judge work and child-care, efficiency and clogged transportation systems, expensive cars and inconvenient office space, increased specialization and increasing obsolescence. We are caught up in an increasing swirl of challenges and decisions.
These changes ask and offer much at the same time, if only we can make sense of them and put them into perspective. For example, what are we to make of altered forms of community, for community in a world of automatic tellers, home shopping, self-service, delivery services, malls, video rentals, and television? How shall we evaluate these social changes and their implications for our lives?
Or consider another facet of the accelerating change: that young people today can expect to make from four to seven career changes in their lifetimes. The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a poignant reminder of a vision from the past. Our children and students can no longer anticipate the knowledge or data that they will need on the job, because they can no longer predict the kinds of jobs that will be available or what they will entail.
What is more, even if the young could predict the general fields in which they will work, about half of the information that is current in each field will be obsolete in six years. Will people recognize which half? Will they know how to access and use it?
 Accelerating change is intermeshed with another powerful force, the increasing complexity of the problems we face. Consider, for a moment, solid waste management. This problem involves every level of government, every department: from energy to water quality, to planning, to revenues, to public health. Without a cooperative venture, without bridging the territorial domains, without overcoming the implicit adversarial process within which we currently operate, the responsible parties at each tier of government cannot even begin to solve these problems. When they do communicate, they often do not speak honestly about the issues given the human propensity to mask the limitations of one’s position and promote one’s narrow but deeply vested interests.
Consider the issues of depletion of the ozone layer, world hunger, over-population, and AIDS. Without a grasp of the elements, and internal relationships of the elements, in each of dozens of interrelating systems from specific product emissions to social incentives, from effective utilization of the media to human learning, we are adrift in a stormy sea of information. Without a grasp of the of political realities, economic pressures, scientific data on the physical environment and its changes — all of which are simultaneously changing the as well — we stand no chance of making any significant positive impact on the deterioration of the quality of life for all who share the planet.
These two characteristics, then, accelerating change and increasing complexity — with their incessant demand for a new capacity to adapt, for the now rare ability to think effectively through new problems and situations in new ways — sound the death knell for traditional methods of learning how to survive in the world in which we live. How can we adapt to reality when reality won’t give us time to master it before it changes itself, again and again, in ways we cannot anticipate? As we struggle to gain insight, let’s look more closely at the operating forces.
Robert Heilbroner, the distinguished American economist, in Twenty-First Century Capitalism, identifies capitalism as a global force that brings us “kaleidoscopic changefulness,” a “torrent of market-driven change.” As he illustrates in example after example, “If capitalism is anything, it is a social order in constant change — and beyond that, change that seems to have a direction, an underlying principle of motion, a logic.” The logic, however, is the logic of “creative destruction, the unpredictable displacement of one process or product by another at the hands of giant enterprise” (p. 20).
Furthermore, along with kaleidoscopic change, along with the continual social transformations that follow from those changes, come “both wealth and misery,” development and damage, a “two-edged sword” that makes instability permanent in unpredicted and unpredictable forms. Basic change continually destabilizes the system at the micro-level, making for multiple imbalances and upheavals. The complexity and speed of change means that we shall always have to make unpredictable adjustments to both the upsides and downsides that result from this upheaval, for we cannot hope to predict the myriad of micro-level system changes that are continually emerging and putting pressure on the system at the macro level.
We can no longer rely on the past to be the guide for the future. Technology will continually race ahead, creating links that make the world smaller and smaller. New opportunities will continually emerge but within them are embedded new problems, hence the need for acute readiness and disciplined ingenuity. At every step along the way, however, polished, satiny voices will tempt us astray with slick, simplistic messages that appear to guide us back to the “tried and true.” Often, these voices in fact coax us into policies and practices that continually sacrifice our long-term interests to someone’s short-term gain. In business, education, and politics, the same sirens echo.
Many American business and labor leaders have yet to come to terms with these realities. They yearn for a world of stability in which they can play a predictable game in a predictable way. As Laura Tyson, Chairwoman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors has put it,
… the vast majority of American companies … [continue] to opt for traditional hierarchical work organizations that … [make] few demands on the skills of their workers. In fact, most American companies interviewed by the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce continue to prefer this approach, which dooms most American workers to a low-wage future. If American workers are to look forward to anything more than low-wage employment, changes in work organization are required to upgrade their skills and productivity so that American companies can afford to pay higher wages and still compete in world markets. (“Failing Our Youth: America’s K–12 Education,” p. 52)
What our businesses are failing to change is what European and Japanese companies are changing: namely, “making their high-wage labor more productive not simply by investing in more equipment but by organizing their workers in ways that … [upgrade] their skills.” World-class, internationally competitive companies recognize the need to play a new game and have re-organized themselves accordingly. As Tyson explains,
High productivity work-place organizations depend on workers who can do more than read, write, and do simple arithmetic, and who bring more to their jobs than reliability and a good attitude. In such organizations, workers are asked to use judgment and make decisions rather than to merely follow directions. Management layers disappear as workers take over many of the tasks that others used to do — from quality control to production scheduling. Tasks formerly performed by dozens of unskilled individuals are turned over to a much smaller number of skilled individuals. Often, teams of workers are required to monitor complicated computer-controlled production equipment, to interpret computer output, to perform statistical quality control techniques, and to repair complex and sensitive equipment. (p. 53) [our emphasis]
These new kinds of workers, of course, are not asked merely to “use judgment and make decisions,” rather they are asked to use good judgment and make well-thought-out decisions. How will workers acquire these fundamental abilities to think deeply and well? Are educators able to “make meaning” out of these exhortations of our leaders?
Bold changes in business organization and practices require parallel changes in education. Yet the U.S. public school systems, like most U.S. businesses, remain mired in the past, focused on lower order skills, and unresponsive to the need for higher order abilities. Again, as Laura Tyson puts it, “[Higher-order tasks] … require higher-order language, math, scientific, and reasoning skills that America’s K–12 education system is not providing.”
Our students deserve at least a fighting chance to compete, to rise to the challenges of the day. Reconstructing and adapting our business and educational systems to teach our managers as well as our teachers and administrators how to create these higher order workplaces and classrooms, and then to expect them to do so in the ordinary course of their professional obligations, is our first major challenge. Today, at every level, we are failing this test, failing our students and workers, jeopardizing our future. What is missing is a genuine sense of what accelerating change entails and a shared public vision of the need for fundamental changes. Many of our leading economic analysts are struggling to create just such a new frame of reference within which we can come to terms with the new imperatives.

The Vision of Robert Reich: The Thinking of Workers as the New Capital
Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor, in his seminal book, The Work of Nations, offers a shocking perspective. No longer will economies be tied to the fate of national corporations. No longer will we be sheltered by the power of our enormous industrial complex, our major corporations. No longer can we say, “What is good for General Motors is good for the United States!” The new form of “wealth” will no longer principally reside in the number of dollars in American pockets. Rather it will reside in the quality of the minds of our workers. As Reich puts it,
We are living through a transformation that will rearrange the politics and economics of the coming century. There will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no national industries. There will no longer be national economies, or at least not as we have come to understand that concept. All that will remain rooted within national borders are the people who comprise a nation. Each nation’s primary assets will be its citizens’ skills and insights. (p. 3)
The changes triggered and fueled by new opportunities will bring an economy . . . replete with unidentified problems, unknown solutions, and unknown means of putting them together — mastery of old domains of knowledge isn’t nearly enough to guarantee a good income. Nor, importantly, is it even necessary . . . What is more valuable is the capacity to effectively and creatively use the knowledge. (p. 182)
Routinely, jobs and production, the income that those jobs generate, and its multiplying effects in commerce, are leaping national boundaries, seeking optimum conditions for competition. We are facing competition for the production work that Americans have habitually taken as their birthright. The competitors are everywhere, as growing pressures of overpopulation and environmental problems make more people willing to work for lower wages and more governments willing to offer incentives to incoming business.
Certainly, many industries are still located here in the United States; however, there is a hemorrhage of routine production work that is moving to Mexico, to Asia, to Central and South America where workers are able to produce the same product for international markets at a significant savings to the organization. U.S. workers are bewildered and afraid, watching their standard of living decline with every year.
 In the emerging global economy, even the most impressive of positions in the most prestigious of organizations is vulnerable to worldwide competition if it entails easily replicated routines. The only true competitive advantage lies in skill in solving, identifying, and brokering new problems. (p. 184)
Reich claims that the distinguishing characteristic of workers who will retain their jobs will be the ability to “add value” to the production process. This translates into being able to identify and solve problems at every level relative to the job function. It means taking initiative and responsibility for the continuous improvement of production and efficiency, from the shop floor to the executive suite. To the extent that our labor force can shift into a cooperative venture with management, sharing responsibility for enhanced performance and production, jobs are more likely to be retained within our national boundaries.
The possession of capital will not in itself be a sure source of national wealth because American capital, as all other “national” capital, will be drawn to and invested in the nations where the work forces produce the highest level of return. Profit will stem from successful problem solving and brokering. Reich identifies a spiral wherein increasing opportunities for problem solving will provide the fodder for increasing our workers’ capacity to solve more and more complex problems. Mastery of each new task requires new learning, thus enhancing each worker’s capacity to contribute to the next new task.
Enhancing our capacity to solve problems will also produce more job opportunities, and up the spiral we will march as our workers continue to become better at solving the problems we face and continue to expand our inventories of skills and experience. The effectiveness and quality of our workers’ thinking will drive us up the spiral, and will provide the basis for the wealth of the nation.
But do our workers and managers see this spiral? Do we see that it is the effectiveness and quality of our thinking that enables us to climb it? What is patently clear is that the spiral flows both up and down. What is unclear is whether we have the vision and determination to reverse our current course. Assuming we do have the will, we still need to know how to proceed.
Reich identifies four components of the kind of critical thinking that the highly-paid workers of today and the future will increasingly need to master: 1) abstraction, 2) system thinking, 3) experimentation and testing, and 4) collaboration. He calls the critical thinkers in possession of these basic abilities “symbolic analysts.” Let us look briefly at how Reich characterizes each of these four generic abilities.
Command of Abstractions
The capacity for abstraction — for discovering patterns and meanings — is, of course, the very essence of symbolic analysis, in which reality must be simplified so that it can be understood and manipulated in new ways… Every innovative scientist, lawyer, engineer, designer, management consultant, screenwriter, or advertiser is continuously searching for new ways to represent reality which will be more compelling or revealing than the old…. [But] for most children in the United States and around the world, formal education entails just the opposite kind of learning. Rather than construct meanings for themselves, meanings are imposed upon them. (pp. 229–230)
Thinking Within Systems
The education of the symbolic analyst emphasizes system thinking. Rather than teach students how to solve a problem that is presented to them, they are taught to examine why the problem arises and how it is connected to other problems. Learning how to travel from one place to another by following a prescribed route is one thing; learning the entire terrain so that you can find shortcuts to wherever you may want to go is quite another. (p. 231)
Testing Ideas
Instead of emphasizing the transmission of information, the focus is on judgment and interpretation. The student is taught to get behind the data — to ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, how they were deduced, and how they might be contradicted. The student learns to examine reality from many angles, in different lights, and thus to visualize new possibilities and choices. The symbolic-analytic mind is trained to be skeptical, curious, and creative. (p. 230)
Learning to Collaborate and Communicate
… in America’s best classrooms … the emphasis has shifted. Instead of individual achievement and competition, the focus is on group learning. Students learn to articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they identify and find answers. They learn how to seek and accept criticism from peers, solicit help, and give credit to others. They also learn to negotiate — to explain their own needs, to discern what others need and view things from others’ perspectives. (p. 233)
How many critical thinkers (symbolic analysts) will we have the foresight to develop? For each student we fail to reach, we create an economic dependent; for each student we help to possess the requisite abilities and traits, we create a producer who can carry not only himself or herself, but those dependents inevitable in any society. How urgent do we perceive the problem to be? How clearly do we understand the problem and its dimensions?
The Vision of Lester Thurow:
 Two Forms of Capitalism at War in a World of Economic Revolutions
The world that Lester Thurow looks out upon is a world of multiple revolutions: a green revolution, a materials-science revolution, a telecommunications-computer-transportation-logistics revolution. These revolutions require fundamental changes in all economies around the world. We live in a multi-polar world: the global economy is no longer pivoting solely around the United States as it did in the fifties and sixties.
As Thurow sees it, “Nowhere are the necessary changes going to be harder to make than in the United States, for in the past century it has been the most successful economy in the world.” (Head to Head, p. 16) Our tendency, Thurow believes, will be to continue the strategies that brought us success in the past, even though those strategies no longer fit a “multi-polar” world.
For example, military power is now a distinct disadvantage rather than an advantage, a drain on the national treasury and a limitation on investments necessary for competition. Here are the new questions that in Thurow’s view can be used to measure world economic strength.
Who can make the best products? What expands their standards of living most rapidly? Who has the best-educated and best-skilled work force in the world? Who is the world’s leader in investment — plant and equipment, research and development, infrastructure? Who organizes best? Whose institutions — government, education, business — are world leaders in efficiency? (pp. 23–24)
Much of Thurow’s argument is based on a distinction between the two forms of capitalism currently in competition for world leadership: communitarian and individualistic capitalism. In every way, Thurow argues, it is clear that communitarian capitalism (such as in Germany and Japan) wins out over individualistic capitalism (such as in U.S. and Great Britain). This is reflected in many statistics including those of the World Economic Forum relating to American, German, and Japanese management (p. 162). Thurow sums up the problem as follows:
Japan and Germany, the countries that are outperforming America in international trade, do not have less government or more motivated individuals. They are countries noted for their careful organization of teams — teams that involve workers and managers, teams that involve suppliers and customers, teams that involve government and business…. But American mythology extols only the individual — the Lone Ranger or Rambo…. History is littered with the wrecks of countries whose mythologies were more important than reality. (p. 298)
In essence, Thurow’s analysis calls for a transformed American global view in which we recognize the obsolescence of some of our most fundamental traditional assumptions and the need to shift our world-view — to make no less than a fundamental intellectual paradigm shift.
But isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that has never put a premium on the ability to think critically? Isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that historically has been able to solve its problems with sheer hard work and physical courage? Isn’t this asking a lot of a nation that believes deeply in the tried and true, that has been conditioned to think of itself as leading not following and as being the most progressive, as being always number one?
Thurow nowhere discusses how this shift is to occur, how the electorate is to be persuaded into such a radical re-orientation. We tend to seek security in the familiar, in the established, in the traditional: if we don’t find it immediately, we look harder, but in the same places! Since most Americans have not been prepared by their education to do the requisite critical thinking that would support a paradigm shift such as Thurow suggests, how are they to do it?
If Thurow is right in his analysis of world economic conditions, then it will not be sufficient for a small minority of highly paid workers to learn to think critically as “symbolic analysts.” It will not be enough for a few to be comfortable with abstractions, to be able to think in terms of alternative systems, to test ideas for their strengths, and to recognize the value of collaboration. But here, again, is the most pressing problem of the day: How are we to persuade educators, how are we to persuade citizens, how are we to persuade parents that a new economic era is dawning? How are we to persuade the general public, which itself has not learned to think critically, that it is now in our collective national interest to set as our first priority the development of critical thinking abilities and traits in all of our children?









The Vision of W. Edwards Deming:
 Everyone a Critical Thinker Contributing to Continuous Improvement
W. Edwards Deming, the American marvel who, after WWII, designed the highly successful Japanese style of management and production, built his whole approach on the assumption that the most important asset of any company is the capacity of the individuals in it to use their ability to think critically to improve their collective performance. Success can be found, in his view, in the ability to devise structures that systematically encourage and reward the critique and improvement of process. He therefore established a system of interrelated networks of “workers and managers” (quality control circles, so called) who use “critical reflection in a formal but unthreatening setting so as to establish what it is good to do.” (Holt, p. 383)
 When procedures are designed to bring the maximum degree of constructive critical thinking to bear on the problems of production, virtually everyone has a potential contribution to make. The quality of the contribution will not be a function of the worker’s position in the hierarchy, but the quality of the critical thinking he or she brings to bear on the problem. This, again, requires the paradigm shift that American businesses seem reluctant to make.
Unfortunately, though Deming is now popular and much has been written about the Deming way and “total quality management,” most writings emphasize the “techniques” and “procedures” of Deming while leaving out the critical thinking they require to succeed. They have tried to “formalize” Deming, to reduce Deming to a series of procedures and charts. The inevitable result is a caricature of Deming: Total Quality Control without the “quality.” Only excellence in thinking can produce genuine, continuous improvement in quality, and excellence in thinking cannot be produced with simplistic procedures and slogans.
But we are still captive of a traditional American assumption that might be expressed as follows: “Every idea of importance can be expressed simply and learned easily. The true challenges of life are to be found in everyday hard work and extraordinary courage and neither of those require deep or ‘intellectual’ thinking.”
The necessary paradigm shifts, however, do entail the cultivation of critical thinking across the work force, up and down the lines of labor and management, across industries, across educational levels, and into the everyday discussions of national and international issues. This shift is painfully against the American grain, contrary to our traditional folk wisdom, and incompatible with much current thinking of both business and labor leaders.
The Vision of Robert Heilbroner: The Challenge of Large-Scale Disorder
Robert Heilbroner argues, as do Reich and Thurow, that though capitalism will be dominant in the 21st Century, there will be serious conflicts between opposing forms of capitalism. As a result of these conflicts, a new and perplexing dimension to the picture will emerge: the challenge of “macro-disorder,” of economy-wide and world-wide problems arising from the market mechanism following its own logic without making critical adjustments. This problem calls for solutions we have yet to think through. He calls this problem that of negative “externalities,” of market failures that have large-scale, and to date uncontrolled, negative consequences.
 Addressing these large-scale problems requires a new brand of both leadership and followership. We need leaders who become comfortable talking about and thinking through complexities. We need “followers” with the thoughtful ability and patience to grasp the very complexities being explained. Here are some of the large-scale problems that Heilbroner has in mind:
The overcutting of forests, the overfishing of the seas, the over-consumption of gasoline . . .  the indeterminacy of the outlook for investment and for technology; the unequal distribution of incomes; the volatility of credit; the tendency towards monopoly; over-regulation; the technological displacement of labor and the technological impetus towards cartelization; the inflationary tendencies of a successful economy and the depressive tendencies of an unsuccessful one; the vacillation between optimism and pessimism . . . the approach of ecological barriers . . .  the internationalizing tendency of capital that continues to outpace the defensive powers of individual governments. (p. 104)
He summarizes our situation as follows:
… the problems of capitalist disorder — too many to recite, too complex in their origins to take up one at a time . . . arise from the workings of the system . . . The problems must be addressed by the assertion of political will . . .  the undesired dynamics of the economic sphere must be contained, redressed, or redirected by the only agency capable of asserting a counter-force to that of the economic sphere. It is the government. (pp. 108–109)
The unanswered questions are, “Who or what is going to direct governments to make rational decisions in the long-term public interest? Where are we to turn to find this new kind of leader? How are we to cultivate the new kind of electorate?”
If the electorates in the various countries do not learn to think critically about large and vexing questions in the environment, in the economy, in health care and overpopulation, it is likely that government policies will be directed by small groups whose short-range interests easily triumph over long-range public good. We are facing basic problems in our capacity to govern ourselves. But all government is finally government made up of people, and people can rise only to the height of their own ability. The crucial issue is, “Will we develop the thinking abilities and intellectual traits of our citizens to a level that will be sufficient for survival?”
The Challenge of the Future
The world of the 21st Century — virtually all commentators agree — will see intensifying economic competition between forms of capitalism. Governmental, economic, social, and environmental problems will become increasingly complex and interdependent. Basic causes will be both global and national. The forces to be understood and controlled will be corporate, national, trans-national, cultural, religious, economic, and environmental, all intricately intertwined. Critical thinking will become a survival need, an external imperative for every nation and for every individual who must survive on his or her own talents, abilities, and traits.
A battle for economic vitality is being fought. Yet consider how unprepared we have been, and continue to be, for that battle. Consider the size of our national debt, the decay of our infrastructure. Consider the intensification of social divisions and divisiveness, the obsolescence of our systems of public education. Consider our traditional but increasingly dangerous assumption that the solutions to our problems lie in a dependence on traditional wisdom. Consider our traditional anti-intellectualism, our traditional parochialism. Can we free ourselves from our own narrow modes of thinking?
Can we accept the fact of accelerating change and complexity? Can we develop intellectual humility and flexibility? Can we develop faith in reason as a tool of discovery? Can we learn to think within points of view other than our own? Can we accept that we are no longer the dominant economic force in the world? Can we learn to think in the long-term and not simply in terms of short-term advantages? Can we begin to make decisions that are in the long-range interest of our children and their well-being? Can we become habitual thinkers rather than reactors and learn to continually inform our action with deep thought? These are the challenges we face. How we respond to them will determine our national fate.
Implications
What, then, do we need to do?
 As a society, our challenge is to recognize that the work of the future is the work of the mind, intellectual work, work that involves reasoning and intellectual self-discipline. Our challenge is to demonstrate intellectual courage in facing our traditional indifference to the development of our minds, our traditional arrogance in assuming that our common sense will always provide the answers, and that our example will always lead the world. We are unaccustomed to this kind of challenge.
We are uncomfortable with things intellectual. The very word smacks of subversive, egghead, ivory tower, out of touch, impractical, unrealistic. Our collective mindset is now working against us and we must own that fact. We need to “discover,” and then genuinely explore in depth this whole notion of substantive critical thinking, of thinking based on intellectual discipline and standards. We need to transform our schools, our businesses, and our lives accordingly. Are we willing to evaluate our own thinking? Are we willing to set ideology aside? Are we willing to re-think our most basic thinking?
To date, we are still under the sway of the misconception that thinking more or less “takes care of itself,” that simply by studying “hard” subjects or “concentrating” we can think well. In general, we still treat knowledge as something that can be given to us and inserted into our minds by memory alone. We must begin now to set ourselves a course that will take many, many years to reach.

1) We must parent differently. We must respond differently to our children’s “Why?” questions. We must not give them short didactic answers, but must encourage them to conjecture as to the answers. We must call more attention to the extent of our own ignorance and not try to convince our children that adults have good answers for most of their questions.
We must dialogue more with our children about complexities in their lives and in ours. We must help them to discover their own capacity to figure things out, to reason through situations. We must hold them responsible to think and not simply to rotely respond. We must step more into their points of view and help them to step more into the points of view of others. We must help them to identify their own assumptions, clarify their emerging concepts, question their habitual inferences. We must raise our children so that critical thinking becomes an integral part of their everyday lives. They must learn to accept its responsibility and come to discover its power and challenge.
2) We must work differently. We must bring the reality of cooperative critical thinking into the workplace in a thorough way. This means that we must abandon quick-fix strategies and recognize the counterfeits of substantial change. We must become aware of the difference, for example, between the jargon of “Total Quality Management” (which we now have in abundance) and the reality (which we almost entirely lack).
Both managers and workers need to learn how to begin to think in a new way: we must learn how to discipline our thinking to a new level of clarity, precision, relevance, depth, and coherence. CEO’s need to learn how to think within alternative models of how to organize and run businesses. Leaders in industry need to learn to broaden their perspectives and think about the long-range interests of the economy and not simply about short-range, vested interests of their businesses. Labor leaders need to concentrate more on support for programs that cultivate broad-based job skills and abilities, that emphasize the basic thinking skills of workers, and less on immediate bread and butter issues.
We must each take it upon ourselves to become lifelong learners, searching for ways to continuously upgrade our reasoning skills, our critical reading skills, our ability and propensity to enter into the points of view of others. Complex problems have many facets, and intellectual humility requires that we become used to exploring multiple perspectives before we make a decision. No more “Ready!… Fire!… Aim!”
3) We must educate differently. We can no longer afford the high cost of educators who have few or no critical thinking skills, and little or no motivation to develop them. Teachers and administrators who do not themselves think critically, cannot design changes in curriculum and instruction that foster critical thinking. We must come to terms with the most fundamental problem in education today and that is “the blind leading the blind.” Many educators do not realize that they are functionally blind to the demands of our post-industrial world.


As CEO and Chairman of Apple Computer, John Sculley, Has Put It
In the new economy, strategic resources no longer just come out of the ground. The strategic resources are ideas and information that come out of our minds.
 The result: as a nation, we have gone from being resource-rich in the old economy to resource-poor in the new economy almost overnight! Our public education has not successfully made the shift from teaching the memorization of facts to achieving the learning of critical thinking skills. We are still trapped in a K–12 public education system which is preparing our youth for jobs that no longer exist.
Is There Room for Any Optimism?
Yet there is room for optimism, but only under certain conditions. We have the theoretical foundation and expertise to bring critical thinking to our children, but do we have the vision and the will? If we do, we have an ace in the hole. What Deming did not anticipate was the opportunity of systematically enhancing the critical thinking of the workers as well as the students in our schools, and the competitive advantage that this would provide.
Those countries with the foresight to systematically cultivate the critical thinking of their citizens of all ages, through the educational systems in schools and the workplace, will enjoy a significant competitive advantage over countries that do not make this effort. This is particularly true when this foresight extends to emphasizing high-quality, Deming-style production models. At present, no country in the world systematically fosters critical thinking. Opportunities await those nations who can see the potential to invest intensely in this specific effort.
What we can be sure of is that the persuasiveness of the argument for critical thinking will only grow year by year, day by day — for the logic of the argument is simply the only prudent response to the accelerating change, to the increasing complexity of our world. No gimmick, no crafty substitute, can be found for the cultivation of quality thinking. The quality of our lives can only become more and more obviously the product of the quality of the thinking we use to create them.
Critical thinking is ancient, but until now its practice was for the elite minority, for the few. But the few, in possession of superior power of disciplined thought, used it as one might only expect, to advance the interests of the few. We can never expect the few to become the long-term benevolent caretakers of the many.
The many must become privy to the superior intellectual abilities, discipline, and traits of the traditional privileged few. Progressively, the power and accessibility of critical thinking will become more and more apparent to more and more people, particularly to those who have had limited access to the educational opportunities available to the fortunate few.
The only question is how long and how painful the process will be and what we shall sacrifice of the public good in the meanwhile. How many of our citizens will live lives unemployed and unemployable in the post-industrial age?
We must sooner or later abandon the traditional attempt to teach our fellow citizens what to think. Such efforts cannot prepare us for the real world we must, in fact, face. We must concentrate instead on teaching ourselves how to think, thus freeing us to think for ourselves, critically, fairmindedly, and deeply. We have no choice, not in the long haul, not in the face of the irrepressible logic of accelerating change and increasing complexity.
References
Holt, R. The Educational Consequences of W. Edwards Deming. Phi Delta Kappan. Jan. 1993.
Heilbroner, Robert. Twenty-First Century Capitalism. House of Anansi Press, Limited, Concord, Ontario. 1992.
Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations. Vintage Books, New York, NY. 1992.
Sculley, John. Remarks to then President-Elect Clinton, December, 1992.
Thurow, Lester. Head to Head. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, NY. 1992.
Tyson, Laura D’Andrea. Failing Our Youth: America’s K–12 Education. New
 Perspectives Quarterly. edited by Nathan Gordels. Winter, 1993.

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Accelerating Change
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