It's Critical in the Classroom - March 2023

Image: Dutch National Archives

Greetings all!

Anything that has ever been published, whether it be a law, a document, an analytical essay, an idea or principle, a monograph, textbook, or piece of journalism – all of it is open to criticism. All of it. I tell my students that they can criticize their little hearts out…in historical context of course, to try and understand what motivated the authors to write it, how it functioned in any particular society, what it sought to argue or accomplish, where it fell short of its goals, and the sentiments of the contemporaries who embraced it (as well as those who didn’t). I encourage them to think of how any piece of published writing has stood the test of time, how people have both used and revised the ideas within any publication to address changing circumstances.

In short, nothing is above honest good faith criticism – whether it be a recent publication, such as the 1619 Project, or the United States Constitution. It’s strange, but these last few years have been concerning to me as a historian…seeing people suggest that criticizing the conclusions of journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones was somehow marginalizing black voices, a point that strikes me as both illiberal and utterly untrue.

But just this week, I was surprised to read in the conservative (and pretty critical) journal Harvard Salient, that “Critical thinking, by encouraging students to adopt a pretense of neutrality, leads them to accept their unconscious prejudices as absolute, neutral truth. Critical thinking prompts students to criticize anything and everything except themselves and their beliefs.”

Now, I’ve been reading this publication for a while now and they (the collected authorship) often have valuable and quite intelligent things to add to the intellectual discourse. But I’m not exactly sure how critical thinking somehow leads students to accept their prejudices as absolute truth. In fact, if we are being intellectually honest about our criticism, then we must – and I mean MUST – acknowledge our prejudices and embrace the possibility that WE might be wrong.

The Salient continues, “By viewing texts primarily as targets of attack rather than potential sources of truth, we lose the opportunity to use assigned texts as guides and counselors for our own lives.” But from where I sit, a critique is just as likely to inform as it is anything else – and perhaps reveal transcendent ideas, even if those ideas fall short in any particular time and place. 

What the Salient seems to be doing is disingenuously conflating critical thinking with their definition of Critical Theory – hardly the same thing. And while I am indeed skeptical of the latter, I would not simply dismiss its practitioners as unilaterally absolutist. The author here suggests that one might pick and choose what is open to critique – and that, I’m afraid, is not how criticism works. 

With compliments,

Keith