Critical Thinking and Dialoguing
Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here at Steve's Café.
Remember, if you don't like me talking about things political and want me to talk about language learning, go to my Lingo Steve channel. Otherwise, this is where I rant on whatever catches my fancy. Today, I'm going to talk about critical thinking and dialoguing, the reason? I saw a tweet. I follow different people on my Twitter account. I follow educators and they were taking about the importance of teaching critical thinking and there's another concept that I came across here in Vancouver called ‘dialoguing'. Simon Fraser University has a Center for Dialoguing where they teach people how to dialogue, how to communicate with respect, respecting diversity and all of these things. There's something within me that objects to both these terms.
I object to the idea that teachers are going to tell people how to think and how to communicate. My experience with critical thinking was while I was on a list serve, which is like a forum of English teachers. When they talked about critical thinking, it was mostly about how they could get their ESL students (English language students) from Honduras, Nicaragua or Afghanistan to challenge the system more. In other words, to recognize that there were powered relationships and they were being abused in some way or whatever. One guy even insisted that all of his students basically lobby the state government -- this was in the States in his case – for more funding for English language instruction for immigrants. Again, it's this idea of teachers directing the minds of students rather than just teaching them English. It wasn't obvious to me that say an immigrant from Honduras who undoubtedly has had to deal with a lot of situations in her/his country would benefit by being taught how to think by some English teacher.
Also, there is often this contrast between sort of Western thought, which is supposed to be more based on challenging things and being call it more logical, whereas the Asians – Chinese, Japanese, Koreans – are meant to be more group-oriented, more go with the flow, don't challenge things logically. I don't believe that really. I think people tend to think and what they think and how they think is a function, to some extent, of what they know and also of their identity, what's important to them. If people were really so rational in Western countries, for example in the United States, we wouldn't have such a large amount of support for Donald Trump.
Obviously, a certain group of people, regardless of how stupid or however many ignorant, impolite, impetuous and ridiculous things he says, they continue to support him. It's not critical thinking that's at play here, it's their identity. It's a bit like in Russia, where the government basically is running their economy into the ground engaged in very expensive call them geopolitical adventures and spending a fortune on propaganda when they have a declining quality of health care, schooling, you name it, yet at a level in their identity they identity with this.
So while they understand that a small number of people are making out like bandits while there is a lack of money for government pensions, hospitals and so forth it doesn't matter. Critical thinking is not what matters the most. In that sense, to imply that somehow an English teacher has a unique ability to teach critical thinking to a student of English I don't buy.
In fact, critical thinking means you must have the same attitude, this sort of critical attitude towards problems as I have. If the student has a different attitude probably the critical thinking teacher will say no, that's not right. You're not thinking critically because you don't agree with me. Similarly with dialoguing, I went to their website Simon Fraser University Center for Dialoguing and there's this thing about finding consensus, being respectful and harmony in all of our communications.
Which sounds like a good idea, but again I don't like that. If I don't agree with you, I'm going to tell you and people can disagree with me. Although, some people's comments here are usually along the lines of you stupid, old, white, conservative idiot, whatever. I get some of those. I wouldn't say usually, but you get some of those. If I criticize Justin Trudeau someone will say, oh, you must hate him. I don't hate him, I just don't happen to like his policies. I'm not carried away by Justin Trudeau, but I don't hate him personally. I'd probably like him. If he came to dinner we'd have a great time, probably. Anyway, dialoguing, the idea is that we're going to find this common ground.
For whatever reason, a friend of mine and I were going to this function organized by Simon Fraser University where we're going to dialogue about stuff. So they organized us around tables and then this student of this Center for Dialoguing explained to us ordinary citizens that now we must learn to dialogue. It's this new, better, more productive way of communicating, respect, harmony and all the rest of it. So we sat around a table and were engaged in this exercise of writing down random thoughts in response to questions and stuff like that and then the student who was sort of chairing our little table would summarize. We were talking about multiculturalism and just about everybody at our table, most of whom were immigrants, said they really want for themselves and their children to assimilate into the Canadian mainstream.
That's what they all said. But the student there, she wrote down we all think it's really valuable that in Canada we have multiculturalism which respects diversity and all this stuff. Which is fine to have as an opinion, but that was not the summary of the views at our table. Subsequently, at lunch I sat down with a student who had harangued us on the importance of harmony, respectful communication and dialoguing and so we were talking about multiculturalism.
Now, I have the view that whatever people do privately, whatever religion they profess privately, whatever languages they're interested in privately, whether it be the language or culture of their heritage call it or whether it be some other culture or language that's entirely up to them, but in a country like Canada with so many immigrants we shouldn't be encouraging people to be different. We're not going to force them to assimilate, but the things we have in common -- that includes a lot of things that were there before the immigrants arrived, the way we communicate, our languages, our sports, different customs -- we should make as attractive as possible so that immigrants actually want to assimilate.
Not force them to assimilate, but assimilate. As has been the case with my family and with many of the people I know, they're just happy to be Canadian. So I more or less explained this to him and this guy when he heard that sort of attacks me.
You bigot! How can you say that, blah, blah, blah? Here's a guy who probably speaks one language, has a very limited knowledge of the world and of history, but he's been given this very small amount of ideology about diversity and multiculturalism, which is fine. He can have his point of view, but having lectured us on dialoguing to then jump at me with accusations of being a bigot to me again demonstrates that dialoguing, in effect, is a code word for saying we must all agree with the established politically-correct position. In fact, there was a student at that Center for Dialoguing who also didn't like the sort of group think, forced think, politically- correct atmosphere and so I said I'll come up and give a talk.
When I was up there talking to the students it was obvious that the majority of the students, I would say 60% of the student, even more so the professor, were not about respect for other people's points of view, but imposing the correct point of view. So when I hear the words critical thinking and dialoguing I tend to be a little skeptical. Thank you for listening, bye for now.
