Education Talks: The challenges of teaching critical thinking to young people

How do you define critical thinking? 

To me, critical thinking is everything that enhances accuracy in sending and receiving information. Sending and receiving information – and the accuracy that is involved – takes two levels, both regarding the outside world or with regards to our inner world, our experiences.

How do you see the state of critical thinking among European youth?

What I've noticed is that quite a few youngsters have withdrawn to ‘little islands’ in which they feel safe, and those are islands, emotional islands with their family or with their friends, and also quite a significant amount of European youth has become very loud, very expressive.

What are the key challenges of teaching critical thinking in schools?

I think the key challenge for all teachers is that the moment you start talking about a potentially divisive topic, it might become ugly in the classroom and there might be very vehement, very moralistic emotions popping up. And I think that's very hard to deal with. I think the reasons for these emotions are multiple.

I mean, it's also the stage we're all in, like Zygmunt Bauman calls it, liquid life – we're in a state of anxiety because we don't really understand what's happening around us, and we don't have frames for it.

There is, of course, the affective polarization, which makes a lot of topics moralistic rather than easy to discuss or easy to access.

Then there is what I call the implosion/explosion among youngsters, which turns everything into either too private or too identity-driven or identity-related. So it's very personal and it makes it very hard to keep a distance.

And of course, there are the normal adolescent emotions that are hard to control in any situation. And of course they shouldn't be controlled, but it would be nice to have them in a constructive way rather than in a destructive way.

How can we make adolescent emotions constructive?

I think it all comes down to a lack of agency that has been experienced by a lot of youngsters. I think a lot of youngsters feel that they don't have any influence on what's happening around them, and this is one of the reasons that people withdraw or become very loud, because it doesn't matter anyway.

And I think what we should do is on the one hand, institutionally, we could help them by opening up roads for participation with real participation. And there are initiatives now by the Polish presidency to enlarge participation by civil society in the field of disinformation. It's called the resilience councils. And I think youth resilience councils would be a very good idea. But also in the classroom you can do a lot. 

And what we tried to do is we started with very basic skill sets, and the basic skill sets are ‘How can you listen without judging immediately?’, and ‘How can you formulate your own expressions, your own opinions, without fearing judgment?’

It's what (Zygmunt) Bauman calls citizen skills. So it's negotiation, dialogue, resolving conflict.

What strategies should schools use to develop pupils' critical thinking skills?

I think the most important strategiy for any school is to start listening and not just sending information. So not being top-down in any kind of skill set requirement, but just trying to be peer-to-peer, or at least being a facilitator to whatever is going on in the classroom. And it's not just limited to this information or to critical thinking. It's about everything.

So I think that youngsters, with their experiences on social media of being interactive and being always in dialogue – I think that should translate to the classroom. And I think strategies to do that make youngsters feel heard, and they don't feel that they have to provoke or that they have to withdraw.

A practical example

With my wife, we do something in our classroom that we call Interdemocracy. It's creating a space for kids to feel seen, heard and safe, and basically what we do is we try to get them to formulate their own opinions, but nobody's allowed to react.

If you do it consistently and you do it structurally, kids do open up and do feel that their voice makes a difference, and then they start voicing what they have inside. And that's a very big step to start.

I think the base of participation is not just about making kids feel heard, seen and safe. I think this is also something that I would call constructive confrontation. And it's basically that our task as teachers, but also I think as institutions, is to instil doubt.

So people have, from that moment, all the space to fill with reflection, with self-reflection. So doubt is a very good thing, and not aiming for definitive answers, but aiming for, searching for, answers.