Up, Down, All Around

Teaching critical thinking is the most important thing we do. You know the saying: give a person a fish; teach a person to fish. . . We want our students to be able to fish for themselves and get their intellectual essential fatty acids forever.

It's not a bad idea, either, if they also learn to look at the situation from the perspective of the fish. Maybe they'll choose not to eat it then, or maybe they still will, but they'll understand the complexity of the situation and make a well-informed moral decision.

Now that word, "moral". . . I dislike it; it makes me feel squeamish and uncomfortable. I far prefer the word "ethical," so maybe I should just use the word ethical.

Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, and Free Will. From the morality play Hickscorner. Reproduced in H.W. Mabie, William Shakespeare (1900).

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/moralities.html

I agree with a lot of what I read on the Critical Thinking Community website, but I don't agree with this assertion - "We must resuscitate minds that are largely dead when we receive them." Students come to us teeming with ideas and opinions, and it's more a manner of connecting, channeling, challenging and engaging.

To me, critical thinking is about unknowing as much as it is about learning. It's about humility, complexity, and entering the wide world of shared knowledge, shared experience, and shared confusion. The benefit therein is not an easier life, but a rich one with strong ties to community, self, society, and the fish that one eats or chooses not to.