Freedom of Speech, Critical Thinking and the Best Way to Learn a Language
Over at The Linguist, Steve's been looking at critical thinking and freedom of speech. Notes Steve, those who mean well are often the quickest to want both to teach critical thinking and to limit the freedom of speech. This, to me, is like teaching someone to make cookies but forbidding them from acquiring flour and chocolate chips: free speech is the raw material on which one exercises one's critical faculties in a free society.
On the question of critical thinking, I think there's a very basic misconception which leads all sorts of well-meaning people astray: critical thinking is not always a tool for arriving at the right answer so much as a means of finding the right answer for you. If I love to work with my hands and am therefore contemplating becoming an accountant - I'll get to push pencils all day! - critical thinking may cause me to reexamine my premises and become a mechanic or a sculptor instead. In the larger scheme of things, likewise, critical thinking will not tell us whether we should invade Iraq, have national health care or criminalize duck hunting. Absolute answers to these questions don't exist. Critical thinking may, however, help a nation decide whether the decision it makes is congruent with the kind of nation its people want it to be.
Robert Heinlein noted that if it can't be expressed in figures, it's opinion, not fact. But that's countered by the old quip that figures don't lie but liars figure. Most often, the liars who are figuring start by lying to themselves. The other day, a colleague remarked that another person in the company had gone about things the wrong way, perhaps, but that he meant well. I breezily chirped in that Hitler had meant well too, but things could have turned out better where he was involved. I was surprised by the vociferousness with which the response came: "He did not!" To this person, it was inconceivable that a person she conceived of as being evil could have had any intention other than to go down in history as synonymous with cruelty, barbarism and megalomania. This is usually the response I get because if even Hitler meant well, people sense, that means that it's not good enough that their own intentions are good. They also have to make sure that the things they do have a positive outcome and this requires thinking before acting and acting according to a mixture of reason and feeling, not feeling alone.
Critical thinking, per se, probably cannot be taught. It can be modeled, to a degree of course. But when it comes to procedures and processes, critical thinking is better for telling us what not to do than what we should do. An acquaintance with the more common logical fallacies won't lead to you acting according to unerring good sense, but it will keep you from repeating the most common mistakes over and over again: at least if you make a mistake, it will be a new one! But in the end, critical thinking tells us more about whether our conclusions emerge logically from our premises or whether we're using the kind of wishful thinking that says, "I'm very pragmatic: since I couldn't afford a Rolls-Royce on my minimum wage income, I settled for a Porsche and saved $200,000. Now I've got enough to make a down payment on a house!"
The reason freedom of speech is so important is that in a world where absolute right answers are relatively scarce, a people has to work to find the right answers for having the kind of country they want to have and living the kinds of lives they want to lead. You can't have perfect order and absolute freedom - the crazies will use their freedom to disrupt order. But you can't have perfect order with no freedom either - the crazies will step outside of the order and lots of people will follow them. So society has to strike a balance, figuring out what it will put up with and in what measure in return for the freedoms and opportunities for growth that are associated versus the restrictions it will put up with in order to maintain order and security. Societies that decide wrongly - Zimbabwe is a strikingly horrifying example these days - pay the price for not finding that balance. Societies that do better - much of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia come to mind - tend to make the money and live the good life. These are, incidentally, the places where open discussion and even downright nasty discussion can take place in the open and where political and financial marketplaces can quickly determine what citizens and consumers will accept as right for them in the aggregate, if not locating the Platonic essence of correctness.
Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. He meant to say that we all mean to do well, unless we are mad, and that in the long run we'll find our way to virtue and intelligent action by the observation of what reasonable and reasonably well off people tend towards. It's sort of circular - something is good because it's aimed at, and it's aimed at because it's good. But this hit or miss notion does well at explaining how self-causing moralities and notions of justice wind up creating stable and profitable societies that march along across the centuries, adjusting here and there but evolving more than changing outright. Freedom of speech and the exercise of critical faculties in deciding what to do with the content of that free speech have tended to create societies that may not be the best by some objective criteria, but that are the ones that everyone seems to want to emigrate to, and so we're back to the good as that at which all things aim.
The above may seem like an idle meditation. In fact, it is but prelude.
The good news is that what follows is much shorter!
What Steve has to say about critical thinking and freedom of speech dovetails nicely with something closer to our focus here: The Best Way to Learn a Foreign Language. To put it simply, there is none. While we tend all of us to grow up in societies and learn languages according to a combination of assimilation and instruction, we are all different. Our backgrounds are different, our experiences in the world are different, the wiring of our brains varies.
It is safe to say that if someone came up with "the food method" - you eat tuna fish to learn German, roast beef to learn French and rice to learn Russian, and that's all you need to do - you could call that person crazy and say that he had no business being a language teacher. Our critical faculties will tell us that we're unlikely to find a mechanism whereby the consumption of certain foods would alter our environment or perception of it sufficiently to cause a new language to come into our brains. But when it comes to Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, The Linguist and those old Dover Essential Grammar of... books, it's plausible to see them as language learning tools. That given, some will want to say, "Yeah, but which one's the best?" That depends on who you are and how you learn.
A certain company whose name escapes me boasts that more people have learned with that company's products than any other. Given the number of monolinguals in the United States, I'd be keeping my mouth shut or somebody's going to notice that twice as many people bought the CDs as speak Spanish and wonder what happened! At any rate, it's great that we haven't found the best way of learning languages, because if we had, all the people it didn't work for would be in trouble. Instead, there's a marketplace of ideas about learning and marketplaces to purchase implementations of those ideas. So have a look around, see what feels right for you and move on if something isn't working for you. If nothing works for you, you will need to examine your commitment to learning and the dedication with which you study. But the odds are that if you're learning one of the more common languages, the right book or CD set to get you started is sitting in a bookstore or online retailer just waiting for you to discover it. Happy searching. And remember, even if it says you'll learn everything you need to know in ten days, it still might have some good stuff and be worth looking at, even if the publisher's marketing department needs a good scolding.
Personal Update Tired of shirking my Breton studies with Assimil, I've deliberately put them on the back burner for the moment. I'm rereading a lesson every two or three days or doing the scriptorium variation I mentioned the other day. In the meantime, I've gotten a hold of a good Breton dictionary and Turn of the Ermine - an anthology of Breton literature - and have been reading, translating and listening to music. I'll come back to the Assimil in a week or two when I get tired of looking things up and decide it's time to expand my knowledge a little more systematically again.
On the question of critical thinking, I think there's a very basic misconception which leads all sorts of well-meaning people astray: critical thinking is not always a tool for arriving at the right answer so much as a means of finding the right answer for you. If I love to work with my hands and am therefore contemplating becoming an accountant - I'll get to push pencils all day! - critical thinking may cause me to reexamine my premises and become a mechanic or a sculptor instead. In the larger scheme of things, likewise, critical thinking will not tell us whether we should invade Iraq, have national health care or criminalize duck hunting. Absolute answers to these questions don't exist. Critical thinking may, however, help a nation decide whether the decision it makes is congruent with the kind of nation its people want it to be.
Robert Heinlein noted that if it can't be expressed in figures, it's opinion, not fact. But that's countered by the old quip that figures don't lie but liars figure. Most often, the liars who are figuring start by lying to themselves. The other day, a colleague remarked that another person in the company had gone about things the wrong way, perhaps, but that he meant well. I breezily chirped in that Hitler had meant well too, but things could have turned out better where he was involved. I was surprised by the vociferousness with which the response came: "He did not!" To this person, it was inconceivable that a person she conceived of as being evil could have had any intention other than to go down in history as synonymous with cruelty, barbarism and megalomania. This is usually the response I get because if even Hitler meant well, people sense, that means that it's not good enough that their own intentions are good. They also have to make sure that the things they do have a positive outcome and this requires thinking before acting and acting according to a mixture of reason and feeling, not feeling alone.
Critical thinking, per se, probably cannot be taught. It can be modeled, to a degree of course. But when it comes to procedures and processes, critical thinking is better for telling us what not to do than what we should do. An acquaintance with the more common logical fallacies won't lead to you acting according to unerring good sense, but it will keep you from repeating the most common mistakes over and over again: at least if you make a mistake, it will be a new one! But in the end, critical thinking tells us more about whether our conclusions emerge logically from our premises or whether we're using the kind of wishful thinking that says, "I'm very pragmatic: since I couldn't afford a Rolls-Royce on my minimum wage income, I settled for a Porsche and saved $200,000. Now I've got enough to make a down payment on a house!"
The reason freedom of speech is so important is that in a world where absolute right answers are relatively scarce, a people has to work to find the right answers for having the kind of country they want to have and living the kinds of lives they want to lead. You can't have perfect order and absolute freedom - the crazies will use their freedom to disrupt order. But you can't have perfect order with no freedom either - the crazies will step outside of the order and lots of people will follow them. So society has to strike a balance, figuring out what it will put up with and in what measure in return for the freedoms and opportunities for growth that are associated versus the restrictions it will put up with in order to maintain order and security. Societies that decide wrongly - Zimbabwe is a strikingly horrifying example these days - pay the price for not finding that balance. Societies that do better - much of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia come to mind - tend to make the money and live the good life. These are, incidentally, the places where open discussion and even downright nasty discussion can take place in the open and where political and financial marketplaces can quickly determine what citizens and consumers will accept as right for them in the aggregate, if not locating the Platonic essence of correctness.
Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. He meant to say that we all mean to do well, unless we are mad, and that in the long run we'll find our way to virtue and intelligent action by the observation of what reasonable and reasonably well off people tend towards. It's sort of circular - something is good because it's aimed at, and it's aimed at because it's good. But this hit or miss notion does well at explaining how self-causing moralities and notions of justice wind up creating stable and profitable societies that march along across the centuries, adjusting here and there but evolving more than changing outright. Freedom of speech and the exercise of critical faculties in deciding what to do with the content of that free speech have tended to create societies that may not be the best by some objective criteria, but that are the ones that everyone seems to want to emigrate to, and so we're back to the good as that at which all things aim.
The above may seem like an idle meditation. In fact, it is but prelude.
The good news is that what follows is much shorter!
What Steve has to say about critical thinking and freedom of speech dovetails nicely with something closer to our focus here: The Best Way to Learn a Foreign Language. To put it simply, there is none. While we tend all of us to grow up in societies and learn languages according to a combination of assimilation and instruction, we are all different. Our backgrounds are different, our experiences in the world are different, the wiring of our brains varies.
It is safe to say that if someone came up with "the food method" - you eat tuna fish to learn German, roast beef to learn French and rice to learn Russian, and that's all you need to do - you could call that person crazy and say that he had no business being a language teacher. Our critical faculties will tell us that we're unlikely to find a mechanism whereby the consumption of certain foods would alter our environment or perception of it sufficiently to cause a new language to come into our brains. But when it comes to Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, The Linguist and those old Dover Essential Grammar of... books, it's plausible to see them as language learning tools. That given, some will want to say, "Yeah, but which one's the best?" That depends on who you are and how you learn.
A certain company whose name escapes me boasts that more people have learned with that company's products than any other. Given the number of monolinguals in the United States, I'd be keeping my mouth shut or somebody's going to notice that twice as many people bought the CDs as speak Spanish and wonder what happened! At any rate, it's great that we haven't found the best way of learning languages, because if we had, all the people it didn't work for would be in trouble. Instead, there's a marketplace of ideas about learning and marketplaces to purchase implementations of those ideas. So have a look around, see what feels right for you and move on if something isn't working for you. If nothing works for you, you will need to examine your commitment to learning and the dedication with which you study. But the odds are that if you're learning one of the more common languages, the right book or CD set to get you started is sitting in a bookstore or online retailer just waiting for you to discover it. Happy searching. And remember, even if it says you'll learn everything you need to know in ten days, it still might have some good stuff and be worth looking at, even if the publisher's marketing department needs a good scolding.
Personal Update Tired of shirking my Breton studies with Assimil, I've deliberately put them on the back burner for the moment. I'm rereading a lesson every two or three days or doing the scriptorium variation I mentioned the other day. In the meantime, I've gotten a hold of a good Breton dictionary and Turn of the Ermine - an anthology of Breton literature - and have been reading, translating and listening to music. I'll come back to the Assimil in a week or two when I get tired of looking things up and decide it's time to expand my knowledge a little more systematically again.
5 Comments:
"Critical thinking, per se, probably cannot be taught"
I guess that depends on what you mean by taught. Obviously, there are no magic words that a teacher speaks and suddenly his students start to think critically (I think we both agree that nothing can be taught this way).
But you can very well give instructions and specific exercises that, if followed by your students, help them to acquire/improve their thinking skills.
I'm so idealistic that I think these skills are actually the most important skills that should be taught in schools and universities, even though today they succeed in a rather limited way. Which is quite weird actually, since there has been a long tradition of teaching critical thinking. For instance, one of the best texts about critical or practical thinking was actually written almost 100 years ago, "Practical Training In Thought" by Rudolf Steiner.
Carsten,
In Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, there's a gag about a software company that gets rich selling the Pentagon software to justify the decisions it has already made. The truth is, we don't need a computer program for this. We're quite capable of fooling ourselves on our own. Academics and experts both left and right periodically issue their demonstrations that a) their viewpoint is scientifically correct and b) their opponents are not merely wrong but quite probably delusional.
Critical thinking is a good tool for making sure your conclusions follow logically from your premises based on the data you have. But it can't tell you whether you designed your problem and your approach to solving it correctly or whether you're using the right data set to begin with.
I believe that critical thinking can be modeled: a teacher can show how he gets from point a to point b and have his students do similar problems. But when it comes to real world problems, there are a lot of variables, many unconsciously in play, that will affect both the problem we are addressing and how we choose to frame it.
Many well-meaning teachers have blind spots about their biases and perceptions that will lead them to insist that if they teach critical thinking successfully, not only will their students learn to think logically but they will also come to understand the logic and essential rightness of the teacher's world view. This is where we get into trouble.
When I was much younger, I had a number of logic classes that were excellent for helping root out the most common errors in thinking and locate things that hadn't been considered when framing a problem. This is useful stuff to demonstrate, and will cause sharp people to chuckle when they see someone arguing till they're blue in the face about the verity of some proposition or another where more passion than cogitation is in evidence. But we must be careful in teaching such stuff to build in a healthy skepticism so that the same students don't go out and make the same sort of errors when they're the ones who are worked up.
This I think is what concerns Steve. I know that it is what concerns me.
You said: "Critical thinking is a good tool for making sure your conclusions follow logically from your premises based on the data you have. But it can't tell you whether you designed your problem and your approach to solving it correctly or whether you're using the right data set to begin with."
A good example of the nonsense you can arrive at with pseudo-critical thinking is the following (taken from the text I referred to above,emphasis by me):
"After the uniform system of postage stamps had been devised, the English minister who then had charge of the mails declared in Parliament that one could not assume any simplification of the system would increase the volume of mail as the impractical Hill anticipated. Even if it did, the London post office would be entirely inadequate to handle the increased volume. It never occurred to this highly “practical” individual that the post office must be fitted to the amount of business, not the business to the size of the post office."
Carsten,
If you think you're crazy, you probably aren't. Conversely, if you think you're eminently logical and practical, you probably aren't. I'd go on, but I'd probably wind up proving my point if I haven't already ;) Suffice to say that the gentleman referred to is in sizable if undistinguished company!
This post made me think of the rising Rosetta Stone tide--mall kiosks,pop-up internet ads and now obnoxious tv commercials: "It's not that you can't learn, it's just that you've been learning the wrong way." D'oh! Years and years of my life wasted when I could've learned Chinese in just forty hours!
It's a message that sounds perilously close to a diet pill slogan, if you ask me.
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