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Excerpt from “Liberal Education and Critical Thinking,” Perspectives XVIII.2 (Summer, 1988):  9-25.

. . . Classroom time is not time in which the general intellectual cultivation of students is attended to. Classroom time, of which professors feel they never have enough, is for covering disciplinary material. (Notice the quantitative bias in the metaphor “cover.” It is a geographical metaphor, and one knows how much territory has been “covered” not by measuring changes in students, but by passing certain pre-determined milestones on that ubiquitous disciplinary map, the class syllabus.) The pressure exerted by this feeling clearly works against using class time to perform such a relatively shapeless and time-costly activity as dialogue. “Besides,” as some teachers say, “dialogue may teach them how to think, but it doesn't teach them chemistry, and I'm paid to teach them chemistry.”

As this example may suggest, a pedagogy genuinely geared to teaching critical thinking would require a much more radical retooling of our pedagogy than most of us realize or desire. If there is a rock upon which the goal of teaching critical thinking is more likely to founder upon than any other, it is not the rock of American materialism, or our students’ careerism, or institutional obtuseness (although these all play a part), but the rock of our own devotion to disciplinary “coverage.” The present “movement” in critical thinking—and especially the facile solution of instituting courses in critical thinking separated from content—is not a solution. So far as I can determine, the superficial nostrums of this “movement”—see such accounts, for example, as that in the March 5, 1986 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (23-25)—offer nothing more sweeping than a few techniques for enhancing or tightening the rigor of what I am here calling “discussion classes.” It has offered no program for addressing the wide-ranging, radical reforms that would have to occur at almost every level of curriculum and pedagogy if the aim of teaching critical thinking were taken seriously. We simply could not do business as usual, and I think it is time for us at least to get honest about what we really want business as usual to be, as opposed to what we say we want it to be. If we really want to teach critical thinking, then let us begin the radical revising of curriculum and pedagogy that this goal calls for. If we aren't willing to do that, then let us stop decrying our students’ intellectual passivity and get on with making the best out of intellectual passivity that we can.

© 2005 Copyright Marshall Gregory