I just read “Beyond Critical Thinking,” a short article in the Chronicle Review by Michael S. Roth, which has been languishing in my “to read” folder since January, when it came out. It’s well worth the read if you are a teacher or student of the humanities. Roth, who is President of Wesleyan University, argues that the “unmasking” function of interpretation that we teach as a defining feature of critical thinking (CT) and which becomes the defining feature of CT for many has value but also can yield unfortunate consequences. “In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker,” Roth contends, “our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense,” and this can encourage a “guardedness” that may not serve them well. A skepticism so thorough as to make any position untenable may make it impossible to see how any position (however flawed or despicable) may have made sense to anyone at all and, thus, undercut opportunities for learning from such positions.
No doubt I am clumsily representing Roth’s position (an effect of muddled thinking, perhaps, and the desire to go ahead and get something posted on this). I think what he is saying (and please do read it yourself) is that an adjunct to the hermeneutic of suspicion needs to be an interpretive strategy that begins in trying to inhabit the subjectivity of others with whom we disagree, which means, often, making ourselves as teachers and our students uncomfortable.
the contemporary humanities should do more than supplement critical thinking with empathy and a desire to understand others from their own point of view. We should also supplement our strong critical engagement with cultural and social norms by developing modes of teaching that allow our students to enter in the value-laden practices of a particular culture to understand better how these values are legitimated: how the values are lived as legitimate. Current thinking in the humanities is often strong at showing that values that are said to be shared are really imposed on more-vulnerable members of a particular group. Current thinking in the humanities is also good at showing the contextualization of norms, whether the context is generated by an anthropological, historical, or other disciplinary matrix. But in both of these cases we ask our students to develop a critical distance from the context or culture they are studying.
Critical distance, a powerful tool, can become a problem. “In other words, we have been less interested in showing how we make a norm legitimate than in sharpening our tools for delegitimization.”
I think this observation and Roth’s argument in general appeals to me at this point in my career beacuse I have been pretty well wrapped up in the hermeneutic of suspicion in my pedagogy for years now. That has been a powerful tool, I wouldn’t throw it out. But I have often wondered about whether or not that’s somewhat “one-sided,” for lack of a better way of putting it.
An example: I can help students see past the surface of a 19th century text into what it really says about race or class or gender, what have you, but I have not really ever tried to help them investigate what legitimated such beliefs for people at the time, “how [those] values [were] lived as legitimate.” That may be because it’s a scary proposition: I have worried that exploring that might look like legitimating it. Roth is quick to point out that such exploration “does not have to mean an acceptance of the status quo…,” but it could be tricky. In any case, I am thinking about how to more fully explore the cultures that I am teaching, so that students come away not merely with a sense of the error they can uncover there but also with a sense of how what we now recognize as error was held as truth in the first place. That seems useful to me.
But like they used to say on Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it: read Roth.