Everyone talks about critical thinking. Here's how schools should actually teach it

If you ask educators today what skills we should be developing in young people, they will more or less all say critical thinking. However, you might have noticed that few actually flesh out what critical thinking means: it’s become an all-encompassing buzz phrase; a stock response to the challenges of the AI era. But what’s actually behind it?

It’s not enough for schools or universities to say that they develop critical thinkers, only to find, in the classroom, students listening docilely to the teacher, copying notes from the board, or following instructions to simply give answers that examiners will like in tests.

In today's AI-saturated world, critical thinking means the devotion to observing carefully, the courage to question deeply, and the will to rethink autonomously.

Critical thinking evolves in a culture of criticality, not just at school and university but in the workplace too. There has to be some degree of freedom to speak your mind, systems and processes that protect people when they are critical of a decision, an ethos of open exchange and calling each other in. We can’t encourage a performative parade of yes men and yes women gathered around authority figures or, at the other extreme, a mob culture dominated by angry ring leaders crowding out any possible discussion.

Within this culture, it is less about the topics and activities learned and more about the spirit in which they are run. A philosophy course can be an exercise in parroting other philosophers’ ideas according to set criteria or it can be a deep personal reflection on a moral dilemma; debate, which is a wonderful way of developing rhetoric, working memory and speech making, is not de facto critical in nature: it can turn into a dog and pony show where students are trying to win points by poking holes in each others’ arguments.

The field of critical thinking was spearheaded by thinkers such as Diane Halpern, Richard Paul and Robert Ennis. They dominated the scene from the 1980s up until roughly 2015.

However, this body of research worked off a completely different type of media: television, newspaper, mainstream press and published books. The Wild West of the internet had been unleashed, but there was nowhere near the type of widespread phone and social media usage that there is today. The major social media companies of today were just getting started as Richard Paul, one of the field’s most decorated thinkers, signed his last works.

Today we are no longer fashioning critical thinking in a context of centralized media propaganda or solemnly and carefully constructed representations and consolidated biased narratives. We are no longer looking at a generation of people who will read through newspapers in the morning and watch the news in the evening. Today we are trying to navigate algorithms, the preponderance of deep fakes, an explosion in the number of different sources of information and, riding over all of it, artificial intelligence which is rapidly expected to evolve into superintelligence.

To develop critical thinking today implies a different kind of pedagogy than it did in the early 2000s.

While the deeper substrate of discerning judgement and logical rigour remains essential to develop, it behooves educators to explain how social media works to young people, so that they understand what they are navigating and how they are being manipulated. It is important to understand that social media, in particular, has become a desperate battleground to sensationalize, often at the expense of accuracy and sometimes in deliberate contradiction of accuracy, and that the reward system being activated in social media feeds is connected to our limbic rather than our cortical system.

In a sense, the media has always operated this way, but the extent of it today is unbridled and the volume of information is incessant and essentially untenable. This tidal wave of emotionally charged noise dampens any real ability to think, let alone think critically, leaving the consumer agape and dumbfounded by it rather than capable of interpreting and deconstructing it. Indeed, part of living with social media critically is learning to resist it, to consume it with moderation and to relieve the senses of its incessance.

Because of this, at my school we have decided to create a bespoke course in critical thinking and social media. It will be run next year by media experts, teachers of media studies, theory of knowledge and history. The course will be open to parents and students and will be structured in the following four movements: The Anatomy of a Hook (What is this trying to make me feel or do?); The Ghost in the Machine on algorithms, echo chambers and shadow profiles (Why am I seeing this?); Decoding the Legacy, on the ideological orientation of traditional media (What is the context for this information?); and The New Literacy, focused on survival skills concerning verification, AI-skepticism and civic responsibility (What do I need to check before I believe this or share it?).

Through case studies and real-life examples we will unpack what is at work behind social media to guide our students to be stronger in their critical appreciation of what they see, hear and read.

All schools should be nurturing this type of learning, somewhere between a contemporary media literacy course and theory of knowledge. It will build upon the habits and understanding that are rapidly becoming prerequisites for understanding the way the world is represented today. And, in doing so, it will build up intellectual freedom, self-agency and autonomy.