A Critical Deficit
Flawed thinking can lead us into a lifetime of pointless arguments and bad decisions. Fixing the problem won’t be easy — but we know how to do it.
By Frederic Bertley
This essay accompanies a separate interview with Frederic Bertley, in which he discusses his strategies for science communication with OpenMind co-editor Corey S. Powell.
Life in 21st-century America is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for the faint of mind.
Every day seems to pile fresh burdens on us. We have to process a tsunami of unfamiliar and frequently contradictory information, and then make the best decisions for ourselves, our families, our jobs, our communities, our nation, and our planet.
Today’s challenges confront us in many areas: personal health and nutrition; global health and sustainability; culture and values; artificial versus human intelligence; trust and expertise; and the intersection of politics and science. We even have to debate the essence of what is true and what is not. I am speaking, of course, of the proliferation of misinformation in both words and images. A study from the Pew Research Center found that only 39 percent of Americans are “very confident” in their ability to identify fake news.
Living successfully requires the consistent application of the skills and practice of critical thinking. This is more than a survival strategy. Critical thinking – when honestly and objectively applied – can help mitigate the extreme polarization that is gripping the United States and many other nations. Activating our critical thinking may not get us to agree more, but it can help us to granularize and drain the emotion out of why we disagree.
We already have a well-organized infrastructure for training people in critical thinking; we just call it by a different name.
We have all heard the exhortation many times – from educators, from speakers at recent commencement exercises – that the goal of an education is not to teach you how to rememberstuff, but instead to teach you how to thinkabout stuff. Who could argue with that? I mean, who out there is going to say, “Critical thinking, nah, that is something we can do without”?
But the reality is that our nation is failing at critical thinking, largely because we are not effectively and comprehensively teaching the necessary skills at the grade school and high school levels. That is where we must start. In a country where 62 percent of people do not have a bachelor’s degree, we cannot rely on colleges to assume the burden of cognitive training.
Fortunately, we already have a well-organized infrastructure for training people in critical thinking; we just call it by a different name. The single best way for us to fill our national critical thinking deficit is through a relentless focus on something we know is a priority for other reasons: education in STEM, the umbrella term for science, technology, engineering, and math.
As a scientist, educator, and the CEO of COSI – the Center of Science and Industry, one of America’s leading science museums – I am convinced that the deepest benefit of teaching STEM actually has little to do with STEM itself.
When students learn STEM at an early age, they are trained in a Socratic manner: They learn to ask the right questions (including questioning themselves), to engage in dialogue, to analyze data, and to think through problems in productive ways. It sounds highfalutin, but what we need to do is teach people how to think like scientists. Inquiry-based learning forces children to challenge their own assumptions at a developmental point when they are most open to new ideas and have not hardened into defensiveness. This style of thinking then carries forward for adults as well.
STEM projects teach teamwork, as students must work together to achieve a common goal. Collaboration fosters critical thinking by exposing students to diverse viewpoints and by encouraging them to refine their ideas and arguments. Being clear and persuasive, in turn, requires developing effective communication skills and the ability to analyze the ubiquitous sea of information, to synthesize conclusions, and to arrive at the best solution.
Cultivating habits of curiosity, questioning, and self-doubt are essential to creating adults who can navigate and cope with a rapidly changing world, full of ambiguous, confusing, and often misleading information.
A strong focus on STEM education is an urgent goal in itself. A recent report surveying more than 2,000 expert Americans working in education, national security, and technology found that 75 percent of them say “the U.S. is losing or has already lost the race for global leadership in science and technology.” Early STEM education is therefore a double win. It will boost the global competitiveness of the U.S. It will also give individuals a personal decision-making toolkit to help them navigate any complex issue – from economic crises to the challenges of climate change to recognizing the impact of the vaccines that have saved more than 150 million lives globally over the past 50 years.
The deepest benefit of teaching STEM actually has little to do with STEM itself.
Educating a generation of wise decision-makers is what scientists call a “non-trivial problem,” meaning it is legitimately hard. We have a fight on our hands. One obstacle is that STEM education is still underfunded. Another obstacle is the continuing drift – lurch is more accurate – to ever-shorter attention spans, encouraged by social media and their associated algorithms. There might be effective cooking hacks and sleep hacks, but there are no hacks for critical thinking. It requires time, reflection, and mental energy, qualities that are a diminishing national resource.
Short attention spans activate our fast brains, and allow cognitive biases (like the availability heuristic, implicit bias, and confirmation bias) to win the day. When biases overwhelm our critical skills, we are prone to making poor decisions, or allowing other people to play us as fools. Without a sustained focus on creating a nation of critical thinkers – with STEM education as the cognitive architecture – we as a population will make increasingly poor decisions about our finances, careers, health, privacy, and all kinds of policies that influence our lives. The cost to society will be in the trillions.
We are constantly bombarded with new stories about urgent crises, but in many ways the critical thinking deficit stands above them all. Critical thinking is essential for getting a clear view of what is going wrong, why it is happening, and how we can achieve the better future that we all desire.
This story originally appeared on OpenMind, a digital magazine tackling science controversies and deceptions.
