Will today’s students still have the opportunity to learn critical thinking?
New Zealand research suggests maybe not.
Over the course of six years and three degrees, the most important thing I learned at university was the ability to think critically. Yes, I learned about specific subjects, like biochemistry and administrative law, but the content wasn’t as valuable as gaining the ability to really think—to identify presuppositions, evaluate arguments, and begin to construct my own view of things. Studying law was particularly helpful for this thanks to its emphasis on advocacy, and so was exposure to a wide range of views and the debates about meaning that these fostered. Increasingly it became obvious that what was advanced as received wisdom was concocted out of a mixture of facts, values, and opinions. Some of it I agreed with and some of it I didn’t; engaging with these ideas was key to personal growth.
I wonder if this would still be possible now; 20-40 percent of current students are reluctant to say what they think in the lecture theatre on issues of politics, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. We’ve heard a lot about polarisation chilling debate on US university campuses, and local academics set out to see whether the same patterns are seen here. By and large, they are. The researchers found that, “New Zealand students are, as a group, far more liberal and less religious than their American counterparts, yet for the most part express similar concerns about expressing their opinions about these and other topics on campus.”
The researchers shy away from offering firm explanations for these findings, but they note an interesting discrepancy. They asked students who they thought would be most comfortable in campus discussions, and the reply was that straight male students would be. But straight male students reported themselves to be among the least comfortable, indicating a potential gap between perception (and the usual rhetoric of public discourse) and reality.
I don’t want to give a rose-tinted picture of my university years; sensitive topics have always been difficult to talk about and the average lecture theatre was not an unfettered experiment in Socratic dialogue. But in the right settings, with the right teachers, it was possible to broach contentious issues, to share your thoughts, and to learn. Today’s students shouldn’t be denied the same opportunity.