Critical Thinking Therapy

Critical thinking skills are important in an environment where misinformation flourishes. In this episode, Linda Elder joins us to explore strategies higher ed institutions can use to encourage the development of critical thinking skills to improve the quality of life for students and faculty. 

Linda is an educational psychologist and a leading authority on critical thinking. She is the President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking. Linda is the author or co-author of 6 books on critical thinking.  Her most recent book is Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and Self-Actualization.

A transcript of this episode and show notes may be found at http://teaforteaching.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Critical thinking skills are important in an environment where misinformation flourishes.
In this episode, we explore strategies higher ed institutions can use to encourage the development
of critical thinking skills to improve the quality of life for students and faculty.

(00:23):
Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of
innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist...
...and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer......and features guests doing important research
and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

(00:54):
Our guest today is Linda Elder. She is an educational psychologist and a leading authority
on critical thinking. Linda is the President of the Foundation for Critical Thinking and the
Executive Director of the Center for Critical Thinking. She is the author or co-author of 6
books on critical thinking. Her most recent book is Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness and
Self-Actualization. Welcome Linda.Thank you for having me.

(01:17):
Thank you for joining us. Our teas today are: Linda, Are you drinking tea?
Yes, I am drinking tea. Do you have a favorite kind
that you're drinking today? It is Assam Banaspaty tea from India.
And the short term is Assam tea. And it's a black tea which is pure. It has a slightly sweet taste.

(01:39):
Does not require any additional sweeteners, and I steep it, of course, in this little pot from
England with loose tea. …a gorgeous pot.
It is. Well, I think that the teas that don't require
sweetening are the best. Sounds wonderful.I often look for a black tea that is pure,

(02:03):
not mixed. So for those to whom that appeals, this would be a good option.
Sounds really good. I have an English afternoon today,
And I think that is Assam tea, isn't it? =I think it is, yeah.
Okay, and I have a ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.
So we've invited you here today to discuss Critical Thinking Therapy. Before we begin

(02:26):
discussing your new book, though, it might be helpful to discuss the definition of critical
thinking. How do you define critical thinking?Well, it's a complicated question. There is not a
single definition, but there is a core essence of critical thinking, which if you lack that, then
you don't have critical thinking. There's a lot of confusion as to what critical thinking means. Most

(02:52):
people will say that they are critical thinkers, but if you ask them what it is, they would likely
pause. There are a lot of reasons why there's confusion as to the definition, or, let's say,
a reasonable conception. But let's begin with this. I could begin with a question instead of

an answer, which would be possibly this (03:10):
“How do  you… you anyone… How do you decide what to believe
and what not to believe? How do you know that you are using the best standards for thinking in every
circumstance of your life? In other words, how do you even decide how to live? What criteria do you

(03:35):
use? Here, enter critical thinking. So what humans mainly do as we go through life is reason. We tend
to ignore reasoning. Critical thinking asks what is involved in reasoning. So how do we analyze the
reasoning we're doing every day? How do we take it apart? And then once we've done that, how do we

(03:55):
assess the thinking that we're doing for quality? So we know that we need standards for thinking. We
know that we need to take our thinking apart, and we know that we need to look for problems
in our thinking. Critical Thinking provides explicit tools for that in order to improve
our reasoning where necessary, and to be able to accurately interpret other people's reasoning,

(04:24):
to judge other people's reasoning in ways that make sense, again, in context. So what is critical
thinking? It's the study of reasoning in which we look for problems in reasoning in order to
correct those problems. We begin with a number of assumptions, one of them being that if we leave

(04:47):
our thinking to itself without intervention, it may well be problematic, and we don't want to have
some kind of nebulous, ambiguous approach to our reasoning. We want the best tools that we can find
through our natural languages, the best concepts that we can develop to guide our reasoning,

(05:11):
and this is what critical thinking provides. You’ve done a tremendous amount of work on
critical thinking. In fact, on our very second podcast, your work had come up on that. That was
eight years ago, I think, now.Yeah.
Could you tell us a little bit about the origin of this new book project?
Critical thinking, in and of itself, provides, as I said, a set of tools for us to help understand

(05:36):
what is even happening in our reasoning and how to improve our reasoning. But in and of itself,
the tools are… they just sit there. They need to do something. So they need to be applied
to domains of our lives. So we need to apply critical thinking to our personal relationships,
to our intimate relationships, to our parenting, we need to apply critical thinking within science,

(06:03):
within technology, within psychology, within sociology. Within every field of study,
critical thinking is required. So critical thinking, again, provides tools that open
up other systems of thought. Critical thinking therapy is a contextualization then of critical
thinking itself, it's critical thinking applied to the emotional dimension of the mind, which we need

(06:30):
to develop in order to achieve self actualization, or let's say, a self- actualizing lifestyle,
and to achieve happiness insofar as we can achieve happiness within the conditions of our lives.
So critical thinking therapy is a natural contextualization of critical thinking. And

(06:53):
for me personally, this is true, because when I first started learning critical thinking, it
was the personal application that brought me into the theory, whereas most people who are teaching,
which I was doing then and am doing now, most people who are teaching come to critical thinking,

(07:15):
not asking the question, “How can critical thinking help me,” but “how can I bring this to my
students?” And again, the assumption there is, I don't need critical thinking, but my students do,
which is a faulty assumption. But in any case, I've always seen critical thinking
as something that I would want to employ, to live at the highest level, again, of self

(07:40):
fulfillment and to be able to reach into my own capacities at the highest levels that I can.
Can you talk about how improved critical thinking skills can lead to increased happiness and self
actualization that you were just pointing to?Yeah. So let me begin to unpack the concept of
critical thinking a bit, which will lead to some of these skills that you are referring to. So,

(08:04):
remember I said that critical thinking involves analyzing reasoning and assessing reasoning. So
let's bring in some theory of critical thinking now going further. So when we open up reasoning,
we find, in essence, that there are eight elements of reasoning that we can always count on being
there and that we can always enter when we know reasoning is present. Let me just go through

(08:27):
these briefly. Whenever we reason, we reason for a purpose or a set of purposes. We ask a question
or a set of questions. We use information that is relevant to the question. We make, hopefully,
we make inferences based on the information and the assumptions, another element of reasoning that

(08:49):
we bring to the situation. Our assumptions are connected to our concepts, the ideas that guide
our reasoning, which are also connected to our point of view, another element of reasoning, all
of which leads to implications and consequences. So let me say those again, purpose, question,
information, inferences or conclusions, concepts, assumptions, point of view, and implication.

(09:15):
So what we understand is that whenever we reason, which is right now, we're all reasoning,
Each of us is reasoning, and anyone who's joining us in the audience is reasoning. Each of us has
purposes. Each of us is asking questions. Each of us is using information. Each of us is making
inferences. We will do this automatically. We don't learn to reason, we automatically reason.

(09:36):
And so you can see how, if you understand these eight elements, well, you have a leg up from
everyone else, because you now know something that's involved in reasoning. And therefore you

can always ask at least eight questions (09:46):
What is  my purpose right now? What questions am I asking
right now? What information am I using right now? So let's go to a more specific and pointed skill
related to mental health. So let's say that we understand now that whenever we reason,
we have a purpose, and anyone else that we're reasoning with or against, let's say, also has

(10:12):
a purpose or a set of purposes. So when you are in an argument with your spouse, you might stop and
ask yourself, What is my purpose right now? What am I really trying to accomplish? Is my purpose
to sustain the marriage. Is my purpose to give to myself as much as I can to the development of the

(10:35):
other person. Is my purpose to win the argument. Is my purpose to crush the other person. You see
how simple that is. I often say that the early, at least, moves in critical thinking are so easy,
they're hard. Everyone can do that, and everyone avoids doing that because they don't want to

(10:58):
sometimes see their purposes. Often the problem is that you don't want to see your purpose,
not that you don't know that you have a purpose, but now you know you have a purpose. So next time
you're talking to your spouse or your supervisor or your people who report to you or anyone else,
you can always ask yourself this question, what is my purpose right now? What's this other person's

(11:18):
purpose? See, we can do the same thing with question. What question am I asking right now?
So if my purpose is to crush the other person, then my question will be, how can I best crush
this person? How can I put my words together in such a way as to actually demolish this person.
Or it could be physically… people are beating each other up, and what is their purpose? Well,

(11:43):
the problem is often that we have a rational purpose, which would be reasonable and that would
be competing against an irrational purpose. The hidden purpose may be to win, the rational purpose
would be to have a healthy relationship. But those two things don't work together. They can't
be reconciled, so that you're either going to have to decide if you're going to be a rational person,

(12:08):
and that means that now let me bring in some other theory of critical thinking. So we've
talked a little about the elements of reasoning. You have a purpose, you're asking questions,
you're using information. Now, once we have opened our thinking up and we've examined it by saying,
“Okay, well, here's our purpose, here's our question. So now what?” Now we need to see whether
these elements of our reasoning are adhering to what we term intellectual standards. We

(12:36):
can also call these critical thinking standards. Intellectual standards… again, they're so easy,
they're hard. What are some of the essential ones? Clarity, accuracy, relevance, depth, breadth,
logicalness, sufficiency, significance, fairness, and there are others. And these intellectual

(12:59):
standards come from hundreds or 1000s or more of intellectual standards extant in all natural
languages, the languages that we speak every day. So these standards come to us through history,
and the best scholars in every field adhere to these intellectual standards. The thinkers that
are functioning at the highest level in every field are the people who are the clearest,

(13:21):
the most accurate, the most relevant, the most significant, the most broad (meaning they can
think within multiple viewpoints), the most deep (meaning they can think through the complexities
and the issues), they're the most logical, their thinking can be justified. Do you see this is one
of our primary goals, then, in critical thinking is to therefore ask, “Am I being clear right now?”

(13:42):
Let's go back to your argument with your spouse. You can ask yourself whether you are trying to
even understand the other person. Am I even trying to be clear about what this person is saying,
or am I saying? “Oh yeah, I know what you mean by that, but let me just tell you how you're wrong”
and you're just stepping over the other person. So these are intellectual standards that all of

(14:03):
us need to adhere to. Notice again, how easy they are. But then I could ask you this, how
often do you see these being violated in everyday life? These simple, simple, simple strategies. And
finally, in critical thinking, we're not only, though, looking for skills. We're looking to
develop within ourselves a way of living so that we are embodying intellectual characteristics,

(14:27):
intellectual and ethical characteristics, which we call intellectual virtues, such as intellectual
humility, being able to distinguish at any moment what I know from what I do not know, and not
stepping over the boundaries there. Intellectual integrity, saying what I mean and meaning what I
say, and talking to you here in a certain way, and if you come and visit my house, you see the exact

(14:52):
same person, not a different person. And if you follow me around all day long, you see the same
person, not a different person, not a hypocrite. Some people act one way at work and the opposite
way at home. Which are you? Are you a person of integrity or not? Fair mindedness Is another
intellectual virtue. Intellectual autonomy, this is essential to the critical thinker and to mental

(15:18):
health, because one of the reasons why people get in trouble in terms of their mental health is
they're always looking to be validated by someone else, and this is always going to potentially
work against you in terms of mental well being, because you may not be able to, first of all,
find anyone you can really rely on, and you may often find people who you can't rely on to have

(15:44):
good judgment. In any case, you don't want to go around conforming to everything and anything.
Or you don't want to be conforming to the wrong standards. So intellectual virtues are essential
for us to develop. So that's just a beginning place for thinking about the theory of critical
thinking, and then we'll get into this presently. But one thing we have to also understand is that

(16:09):
there are two parts of the mind, or one part with two parts, and that is the part that is working
against our rationality. That's the egocentric and the sociocentric dimension. And I've already
implied these, but the basic idea is, when we're being egocentric, we're either locked within our
point of view, that it has some problematic logic to it, but we can't see it, so we make

(16:34):
it look logical in our minds, or we're just being selfish, and that's easy to document. Sociocentric
thinking has the same parallel, thinking which is either just all for the group. What is good for
the group is good anyone else on the outside, just we don't care about you. We're not concerned about
you. You're not part of our group, so forget it. Or being locked within a dysfunctional logic, and

(16:59):
either or all of these barriers can be functioning at the same time in the mind. So that critical
thinking, we can't just teach the skills you see, for example, I can say, well, all right, teach
your students to be logical. Well, what if their egocentric side tells them not to be logical? What
if their sociocentric side, which is very powerful and wants to conform, conforms to things that are

(17:24):
entirely illogical? So again, the standard is easy, but the application is a challenge.
One of the things you talk about in your book is how we often engage in self deception, and you've
alluded to this a little bit already. How might this be relevant to students and faculty who face
issues like imposter syndrome or stereotype threat or anxiety, which certainly seems to

(17:48):
have been rising for both students and faculty in the last few years in academic settings.
Well, first of all, these problems that you mentioned, imposter syndrome, anxiety and
etc, these are coming from the egocentric mind, and they're coming from a position of fear.
And now all humans have certain self-handicapping tendencies, some people more so than others. So

(18:17):
take imposter syndrome, the idea that you're actually not very good, you're not good enough,
and even though you may be an expert in your field, you still have a sense that you're not
quite good enough, that you're a fake, that you're a fraud, even though the evidence does
not support that. Well, on the one hand, you are working rationally to develop your mind, and so

(18:40):
you are achieving, that's the rational side. But the irrational side is saying these other negative
things. And I can say for anyone who's listening, whether you have the imposter syndrome or any
other handicap that you create in your mind, what you've got to do is command that, control it and
stop it, whatever it takes. And there are many ways to do this. There's not just one path to

(19:06):
rationality. There are many paths. Just take one, any of them. So what you want to see is that when
your mind is telling you things that are… let's say it's a common pattern for a writer who may
be very skilled to think she's not a very good writer. So her ego while she's writing is telling

(19:26):
her “you’re really no good, you know that, you're not going to get this sentence worked out. This is
the time you're going to actually fail.” Now, and those other times you managed to make it through,
but not this time. This time they're going to find out you're really a fake and a fraud. Well,
when we study egocentric thinking as theory and sociocentric thinking as theory, then we know,
“oh, that's what's happening. That's just the dark side of my mind. Everyone's got one. That's what

(19:51):
mine is doing. But look what I've accomplished over here.” Now let's apply the standard of
logicalness. Is it logical to think you're not going to work this out whenever you've worked
it out so many other times before, and you're basically doing something very similar. And now
some people have the opposite problem, where they are over confident, and those people often also

(20:13):
fail because they are just blundering forward. “I can do this, I can do that. I'm good at this. I'm
good at that. I'm Miss smart or Mr. Smart. I know everything. You know nothing.” So all of that is
coming from the dark side. Remember the Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde conception. That's a symbolism for

(20:35):
each of us. And the idea is that within each of us are two different persons, really, two different
ways of thinking. One is the rational side, the reasonable side, the one that tries to be logical
and tries to be accurate and tries to be clear, even when we don't know what any of those mean.
Everyone thinks critically to some degree, or they wouldn't be alive. But we don't think critically

(20:58):
enough, so we need the explicit tools so that we know when we are not thinking critically,
and whenever your mind is telling you any of this kind of nonsense, either “you're so great,
it's unbelievable,” or “you're so pathetic, you'll never be anything,” you've got to recognize that
as just nonsense. Now, one of the things that critical thinking therapy does is it provides

(21:24):
activities or exercises that we all need to engage in if we're going to get command of the mind. You
don't have to engage in these exact ones, but if you're not exercising the mind and asking
it to make moves that it's not comfortable with, you're not feeling any kind of pain,
because your beliefs have always been the same and you intend them to always be the same, then

(21:46):
you won't be able to develop much in terms of your self fulfillment, and so we need to think of the
development of the mind in the same way that we think of the development in playing an instrument.
So if you asked a music teacher, let's say someone who's teaching students to play the violin… you

(22:07):
said, “How many years do you think it would take your students to study and learn and practice to
be good enough for us to want to actually sit in the room and listen to them so they're not
screeching it out.” And I actually asked that question to a violin teacher, and she said,
“three to five years.” So that's what I'm telling everyone here, three to five years working on your

(22:29):
thinking before you will have any sense that you know what critical thinking really is,
because right now, most people are what I would call unreflective thinkers. They're going along.
Their thinking is all right. Many people are listening saying, “Oh, that sounds pretty good,
but I really don't have time for this.” And that's what most teachers say, “It's great stuff, but I
don't have time.” But then we are having to be subjected to these people's reasoning. And like,

(22:55):
if somebody's playing the violin, and screeching, I can walk off. But if you're giving me your
reasoning and it's lousy, and you're a politician and you have power, then that's another matter.
So this is not just critical thinking is a nice thing that we could do if we wanted to,
it's essential to solve the pressing problems that we face as humans living on the planet.

(23:17):
Sounds like one of the things that you're advocating for is that to bring critical
thinking to our students, we have to bring critical thinking to ourselves and really
work on that as a kind of a professional development opportunity for ourselves.
Well, a main reason is because you don't know what it is if you haven't studied it,
and you shouldn't be trying to teach it to someone else if you yourself have not studied something.

(23:39):
And one of the problems that I have with most faculty that are teaching critical thinking, and
they're saying they are now experts in critical thinking, if I were to ask them what theory they
have studied, they would typically not be able to tell me. So in other words, let's say someone
who's a sociologist before, now they can teach a critical thinking course, because that's available

(24:03):
at the college and it's required. So they can take their old course, which was sociology,
and now they can call it sociology and critical thinking, or literature and critical thinking,
or psychology and critical thinking, but if I, as a critical thinking theoretician, said that I was
an expert in their field, they wouldn't tolerate that. But they expect us to tolerate it the other

(24:25):
way around. So, you're not an expert in critical thinking, but you're acting as if you were,
and this is a problem that's emerged over the last few decades. We've always had the problem
of faculty thinking that they are already teaching critical thinking, but now they have the label,
and now educational institutions, so called, are bringing this into their mission statements by

(24:48):
implication. And we are now calling departments of education across the country, and we're saying,
“How are you defining that?” And we're getting a hostile response. They don't want to answer any of
our questions. They don't think they should have to. So if you have not studied something from the
point of the scholarship, that you're a faculty member and you're acting like you have done that,

(25:11):
I have a problem with that, and it's a disservice to the students. So it's worse than it was before,
because critical thinking is now floating about, faculty can grab it and say, “I do it.”
Philosophers have largely lost their influence over critical thinking, because they haven't,
for the most part, embraced a progressive conception of it. They've tried to keep us

(25:34):
in the dark ages with argumentation theory that is narrow and informal logic theory,
which is narrow, and this still is influencing the courses that students are taking. It's old.
It's antiquated. We've had better theory since the 1980s and there's absolutely no excuse.
So we face a lot of problems, and trying to get faculty to see if they have to learn this, rather

(25:59):
than just take a few activities home to their students, it's a hard message to get across.
One of the things you suggest is that it may be helpful to have faculty work together on
developing critical thinking skills. Would a reading group on your book or some type of
faculty community of practice perhaps be helpful in building critical thinking skills for faculty,

(26:21):
so that we might be better at helping students develop critical thinking skills?
Absolutely, I'm a very strong advocate of long-term learning through study groups
at the Foundation for Critical Thinking, through our critical thinking community,
we now have three long-term study groups going. One's been going five years, and we are studying

(26:42):
theory of critical thinking, we're applying it to our lives from the point of view of self
actualization. And we're also studying what I call the essential classics list. So we're reading the
works of authors such as Erich Fromm, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, Seneca, Socrates. So

(27:04):
I've pulled together a list… of course, there are many classics we want the best classics, the ones
that illuminate critical thinking the best, and those are the ones we are studying. These are very
rich assignments, and we're all studying the books that we were supposed to learn, that we never did

(27:24):
read within or that all of the titles that we've heard but we've never read, such as Dickens novels
and Jane Austen novels and so forth. So we are becoming more literate, but more importantly,
we are looking for the best ideas within these works that connect to criticality and that help

(27:45):
form our constellation of ideas that guide and transform us as humans. That's the idea. So there
are many ways to form study groups. You can do it with one book. We can do it with multiple books.
I certainly recommend it with critical thinking therapy. It's quite a thick book, so you can work
with this over a long period of time, and you can dip into it at almost any place. So yes,

(28:11):
I strongly believe in studying together. And there again, people can join us. We're going to start in
a few weeks, a weekly critical thinking therapy workshop meeting time, which will be, as I say,
once a week. And people can email us to get on our email list: [e-mail] and we will

(28:35):
send you an email to let you know when these will be in and we will have some activities for those
meetings, but people will not be required to do those activities. They can join us just as they
wish, and we'll be discussing how we are using critical thinking therapy to improve our lives.

(28:56):
So I'm a very strong advocate for not only study groups, but long-term study groups,
and people can also join our long term study groups at the foundation.
So you've talked about one barrier that students face in developing reflective
thinking and critical thinking skills is maybe not having expertise in the classroom teaching
the critical thinking skills. Are there other barriers in the way that our college systems

(29:20):
work that prevent students from engaging in this kind of deep, reflective thinking?
Well, almost everything that we do in schooling is antithetical to the development of critical
thinking. From the way that we assess students with the neat and tidy assessments that we use,
the inauthentic assessments, to the way that we drill them, we still have the old,

(29:45):
antiquated lecture method being used. It's mind boggling, and we have all this theory of pedagogy
that is largely ignored for the old fashioned way of I want to deliver it this way, and I have
students at the university level with these huge, huge class sizes, just again, giving students

(30:10):
assignments, knowing they didn't read the book, telling them again what you know they didn't read
as a faculty member. This is not going to develop the mind. What we must do is ask this, what does
it take from the point of view of, let's say, a faculty member, if I'm a teacher, what do I need
to do to engage my students intellect every second they're in my presence, every second they're in my

(30:38):
room. How can I get them off of the bench and onto the court? And that will not be through
lecture unless it’s a very rare student, and even then, only for brief periods of time, and that's
including all of us. So we've got to work our way through ideas. The only way we can achieve
ideas is through internalizing them using our own will, And right now, we've got the insanity of the

(31:09):
technological world that our students have are just sucked into and for example, okay, so they
go to YouTube and they just look at what's there, just what's available to me on this social media,
what's available to me on this they're not deliberately making any decisions other than
to open their computer and mindlessly go to some web address that feels good and this is happening.

(31:36):
This is not something that we can ignore in the classroom. We can't ignore any parts of reality
in the classroom. The classroom should be part of reality. So we have that. The students are
being increasingly dumbed down. They think they're doing something when they're on the computer. They
think they're developing their mind. So. for example, students who are on the computer and

(32:00):
they're playing the guitar on the computer, that's not how you play the guitar. You get a guitar,
you put it in your hands, you play it. They don't even realize that they're not doing anything
except that maybe they're enjoying themselves. So what I'm saying is these are barriers,
and the students are coming with this idea that they need to be fed everything. Everything's going

(32:23):
to be easy, and they're going to be automatically accomplishing things if they just turn their
computer on, they sit there and they play these games or whatever they're doing to their minds,
and they're not learning to read, to comprehend what they're reading. We have a thinkers guide
entitled “How to read a paragraph” which is almost entirely ignored in academia. It teaches

(32:45):
students how to take a sentence and say it in your own words, for example. How many students
can't even do that? Read a sentence, say it in your own words. See how, again, so easy,
it's hard. So there are a lot of reasons why we're not advancing critical thinking in the classroom.
One, faculty don't know what it is, but they think they do. Two, we've got the political forces

(33:09):
that are real. We have the fact that schools have always been apologists for the status quo. Schools
have always advanced current ways of thinking, and the mediocre middle is what is encouraged. Those
who are excelling beyond the mediocre middle, are going to have a very difficult time in schools,

(33:34):
and those who are at that middle also are not getting what they deserve. So I won't say that
the schools are hopeless, but it appears to me right now that it's very bad in this regard,
because 30 years ago, at least, there was some sense that there was professional development in

(33:55):
critical thinking needed. Now there is not a sense that professional development is needed. So that's
going backwards. So the term critical thinking, as you know, has gained in use, but not in currency.
We can't really use it because we don't know what it is, but we say it repeatedly.
Now we're living in an environment where we have, in our current administration, for example, people

(34:21):
who seem to have very little respect for science and evidence or facts in general, and students
are consuming that on their social media feeds and in their news feeds. And also, when we try giving
students assignments that might help develop some of these skills, students read much less
today than they ever have in the past, and surveys support that very strongly. And also, students are

(34:45):
relying, to a greater extent, on AI-generated summaries and using AI to complete assignments.
What can we do to try to push back against that to help students develop these skills?
Well, it's not an easy question to answer, because artificial intelligence is such that it has taken

(35:06):
away, to some extent, our ability as faculty to even give written assignments, and it hasn't
solved the problem for us. So we're supposed to solve that problem. Artificial intelligence has
created it, but we're supposed to solve it. So in other words, I'm a faculty member. I've given an

(35:29):
assignment. Artificial Intelligence gives the answer. I should be able to put that computer
in my scanner or some such thing, and artificial intelligence will say, “Yes, this was stolen,” but
it's not doing that, so therefore we're limited. Now, artificial intelligence is at a point where a
lot of assignments you give where it won't give you a reasonable answer, but in other cases,

(35:53):
it will. So for example, artificial intelligence, by the way, has stolen our theory, and we are
fighting that legally right now. And if somebody asks artificial intelligence to do the logic of
a problem like this, “What are the best ways to solve, let's say, pollutions in the ocean?”
Can be a question like that. What is the logic of it? That’s where we go back to the elements

(36:17):
of reasoning. So “the logic of” means when you analyze it and you figure out the parts of that
question. So first of all, artificial intelligence can give us that question very well articulated.
Then it's going to tell us the purpose. It's going to give us the information needed. It's going to
give us the inferences that are reasonable. And it's going to do that better than most people that

(36:40):
I know, maybe anyone that I know, depending on the case. So the problem is there, and therefore,
what's a solution? Well, if you're teaching online, it's going to be very difficult, but if I
were teaching in the classroom, then I would just require my students to write their papers right in
front of me with a pen, and if they couldn't, I mean, if they had some kind of disability, then

(37:03):
I would have to watch over them while they were in my class. Now, critical thinking doesn't take away
our problems. It helps us face them and answer this, how is it that a student can go through
12 years of school but they still can't actually interpret a paragraph accurately, and that's many,

(37:24):
if not most, students. So how many years did you go through it? You can't blame that on artificial
intelligence, not that you are, I'm just saying some things we can't blame on artificial
intelligence. And there are a lot of things we can do in the classroom to teach, stepping aside
artificial intelligence, which we should have been doing all along, having the students read a book

(37:45):
and discuss it with one another, have them write their papers and give feedback on their papers to
each other. The problem is that, again, they can just generate the papers, that we have to address,
and sometimes you just can't address it.Isn't that annoying?
It certainly is.Well, I said the answer,

(38:07):
the answer is for artificial intelligence to find the answer. I don't see why the burden is
always on us critical thinkers, not that I think of myself or anyone as a critical thinker, per se,
because we all think more or less critically, but I was using that as a class, so to speak. It's

(38:27):
interesting how many times we get questions like, “Well, how do you deal with the fact that we're
not allowing time for critical thinking in the classroom?” My answer is, “It's not my fault. It's
the system that is deficient, that is so deficient that it won't allow us to educate the mind, and if

(38:48):
teachers are not learning what education is, if they don't have a deep and rich conception of it,
they're not going to be able to foster it in the classroom.” But again, remember that politically,
schools have never been designed to free the mind. They've never been designed to liberate
the mind, certainly not K-12 schools and higher education is problematic now in multiple ways,

(39:11):
because it's also not doing much to free the mind, and we're losing the humanities.
We're losing literature. This won't do. We will have a renaissance in the humanities,
because our survival will require it. We can't just be Spartans, can't just be technologists

(39:34):
and fighters. I mean, we can, but then we will lose the culture that we built up as humans.
One of the things that our listeners are committed to is inclusive teaching. Can you talk a little
bit about how critical thinking therapy engage with questions of identity, equity and cultural
humility in the classroom, or just generally?Well, first of all, remember, one of the

(39:57):
intellectual standards is reasonability. If we were to foster critical thinking skills,
abilities, and virtues in a significant way in human societies, we wouldn't need diversity and
inclusion programs. That would be happening by implication, and we would think more reasonably
about them. A reason why we have presumably lost some of these is because… well, there

(40:26):
are political reasons, we'll set those aside, the people who just don't want to include other people
we're going to set aside for this conversation, because those are people that are bigots,
they're prejudiced, they're biased, and they're not listening. They don't want to hear this.
Those people will always exist, and let's hope that our listeners don't want to be part of that

(40:47):
group. But if you're not willing to, say, hire someone that's a different skin color from you,
what does that tell us about you? If you're not willing to hire someone who's a different gender
from you or seems to have an unusual orientation to gender, what does that tell us about you? And

(41:07):
everyone is different. Every human is different. I think this idea that we're classing ourselves
either by gender or by race, so-called race, or in any other way that can also be problematic.
I want to be included because I'm a human, but I want to be included also because you would want to
include me. So we're not including everyone. In other words, we're including everyone,

(41:33):
but we're not including all behaviors. We don't want all behaviors. We don't want people who are
in here bullying and abusing, you see. So what I'm saying is, so there have been problems with these
inclusions and diversity programs, because they haven't had the weight of criticality behind them,
typically, and so they've been brought in in superficial ways which will never work and

(41:55):
often will cause even more problems than you had to begin with. So if we start with theory
of critical thinking, and so if I am taught, for example, that my mind sometimes will just
be prejudiced against x, certain people, certain things. Why? Because it just means I'm prejudging.
Why? Because I'm a human So, for example, most people think of men as more in an authoritative

(42:23):
capacity than women. Even women think that. Now, why is that? Well, you might ask yourself,
let's say you've got five people talking, and four of them are women, and one of them is a man,
and you notice that you keep looking at the man, you keep thinking he's the ones going to know
what he's talking about. Then you realize you're prejudiced. You're prejudging these women, because

(42:46):
you have this assumption you're using in your thinking. All of us are doing this, sometimes,
in different ways. The question is, how am I doing it right now? And is it a problem? And is it
causing me to behave in certain ways? I may think something for a few minutes, because someone,
let's say, looks unusual, and I feel myself, what is this? See, that's the ego. And then you say,

(43:09):
wait a minute, this is a person, just a little unusual. Linda, people think that of you, I'm
sure. You see, you have to watch the workings of your mind. Watch the mind making these prejudicial
moves. And if we're going to have these diversity and inclusion programs, we're going to have to get
at the root of reasoning in these ways and show that it is our egocentric and sociocentric nature

(43:32):
that will keep us from including and you have to want to see yourself not including someone
that you should be including. And you should see yourself building someone up when maybe there's
not much evidence to build that person up. So I would say this, any program we bring into the
schools at any level must have criticality at its heart if it's going to succeed and not potentially

(43:58):
cause problems, and that's every program that has reasoning at its heart. So let me take you back
in history, just as a quick example. Remember we have the history of the 1960s and the 1970s
and remember that was going to be a revolutionary movement. And remember there were people up for
free speech and black rights and women's rights, and different groups were banding together for

(44:23):
these rights and to get us out of wars, get us out of Vietnam. And all of that was culminating, and
it resulted in certain positive change, but not nearly the positive change that was expected from
it. And in many ways, we've regressed. And in some ways, the ideas have turned back on themselves,

(44:48):
like take feminism. Feminism at its heart, is about equal rights. In other words, we're not
going to take any of your rights away based on gender. That's the idea behind it. Doesn't
mean that women are better than men. It means equal rights for everyone, and we're focusing on

(45:09):
gender here specifically, but what has happened is that did largely occur. But then what else
came with it? What else came with it was a lot of vulgar thinking about male-female relationships.
What came with it was a lot of sexual harassment policies in the workplace, we have a situation in

(45:34):
which the two of you, unless you're married, you wouldn't be just walking by and just accidentally
or just for a couple minutes, touching the other person's elbow or shoulder. “How are you doing
today?” “How are things?” We can't even touch one another anymore, it seems like because it will be,
“oh, you're in my space. You're violating my rights,” and that's not a good thing. We are

(45:56):
sensual creatures. We're not designed to be puritanical, but that's what has taken root,
and that's jumped on board with feminism, which has resulted in vulgar feminism, which is not
feminism. So we're not trying to get away from all femininity. We're not saying we can't do any
of that anymore. See what I mean. So any issue that we are trying to think critically about,

(46:23):
we've got to think through all of the complexities about. We've got to think through all of these
complexities, and we can't just have one blanket move that we make, and then everyone has got to
abide by this, and the original intent is really lost in what comes after it. And let me say, the

(46:47):
gay rights movement and alternate ways of thinking about gender movement, that served good purposes,
but things also can turn the other way. So if you have a gay person walking up to a heterosexual
person saying, “Well, what do you mean having babies? We don't need any more on the planet.

(47:07):
We don't need any more of you people.” Well, that's also problematic. So critical thinking
is going to be required for every move that we make, and it's going to mean that we're going to
be open to alternative ways of looking at life and alternative ways of living. And as long as people
are not harming you and you're not harming them, and everyone is getting along peacefully, then

(47:30):
that's a good thing. So we have to be careful, the policies that we raise our voices in support of,
because we don't know all the implications of what we're supporting sometimes.
So far, we’ve talked quite a bit about critical thinking, but we haven’t yet
discussed critical thinking therapy. Can you talk a bit about critical thinking therapy?

(47:53):
So what critical thinking therapy does is it brings to the field of therapy all of the tools
of criticality that have been developed over the last decades and that are largely missing
right now in a systematic way from the therapeutic scene. And by that I mean mental health therapy.

(48:15):
And as I say in the book, when therapists begin to use this, because this is a brand new therapy.
When they begin to use it, they're going to see an immediate connection to critical thinking and
cognitive behavioral therapeutic approaches. But I'm arguing that critical thinking therapy should
not be subsumed underneath cognitive behavioral therapies, because cognitive behavioral therapies

(48:41):
themselves are mixed in terms of quality. Those that are based in the work of Albert Ellis in
rational emotive behavior therapy, beginning of the 1950s and moving forward, this will be among
the best work that you're going to find there in the CBT arena, so to speak. And much of what Ellis

(49:04):
did and said, of course, directly dovetails with critical thinking therapy. But again,
what is different is that I've taken all of the tools, and I've shown how if you take any of these
tools seriously, you're going to see application to your mental well being. So if I, for example,
take intellectual autonomy, that was one that I mentioned before, the healthiest people mentally

(49:28):
and emotionally are the people who are comfortable in themselves. They don't need other people to
tell them they're okay. They're not looking to be validated by anyone. They recognize that they
need social interaction at some levels, but they need no one for their self confidence. But they

(49:50):
also don't have an inflated view of themselves. So they're not out preaching to everyone else in
terms of how to live. They are contributing to the common good when they can. They are taking
care of themselves first, because you can't help someone else if you are not whole yourself

(50:12):
and they develop a voice of rationality that helps them achieve, again at the highest levels they're
capable of achieving within, and this means activating all of the will to achieve and to

(50:35):
contribute that you can. And it means believing in the power of your own mind. So if you want
to achieve at the highest levels, it's your mind that is holding you back, or it is society that is
holding you back, or it is other people who are holding you back, and sometimes we can't escape

(51:00):
certain things. We can't escape societal rules and customs and laws to some degree. And some of the
laws are good. We need traffic laws, apparently. So that's a good thing, but there are a lot of
laws we don't need. And laws are added and added, and we have hundreds of thousands of laws upon us,

(51:21):
and we are born into circles of ideas, of dogmas that are thrust upon us as children.
We live our whole lives within, moving in and out of pathological ways of thinking on
the part of systems, which are driven by humans, and we have to brush up against these. Sometimes

(51:46):
people are thrust in them and in ways that they feel that they just cannot extricate themselves.
And what I will say is that there are limitations, true, but there's usually a lot more that we can
do with our minds than that we are doing with our minds, and critical thinking therapy will

(52:08):
help you find your own path and develop the capacity to achieve what you want to achieve,
but you have to believe that you can. Again, critical thinking therapy will help you with that.
So let me say that for anyone who is interested in developing their minds, and they have felt

(52:31):
they've tried this and they've tried that, and this hasn't worked, and that hasn't worked,
and they still haven't achieved, this is the book for you, and I hope that you will use it and that
you will let me know how it is working for you.So we always wrap up by asking, what's next?
Well, what is next is for people to take critical thinking seriously. That is what is next. And you

(52:55):
see, before 1980 we did not have the tools that we have now. Richard Paul really began to develop
them starting in the 1960s. They came to fruition by the 1980s. We've had these theories since then,
which should have already permeated education in the United States, but instead, schools, colleges,

(53:17):
and universities have continued to slap dash at it and not take it seriously. So what is next is for
all of us to take our minds more seriously through the tools of criticality. And I would argue as
well that what we need is to establish a field of criticology, the logic of criticality, the logic

(53:39):
of critical thinking. Critical thinking needs its own field, so that it's not going to be owned and
operated by, in essence, imposters, people who are not studying theory of critical thinking
but are pretending that they're experts. So this is what is next. Thank you for the question.

(54:00):
Well, thank you. I think we can all agree that there's a need for more critical thinking,
and your book is a nice addition to the literature out there.
Thanks for sharing a lot of things for us to critically think about moving forward.
Thank you for having me. I hope that this has helped people who are interested in both critical
thinking and critical thinking therapy understand a little bit more about both of these.

(54:30):
If you've enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes
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our Tea for Teaching Facebook page. You can find show notes, transcripts and
other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.