TEHRAN - Clayton Crockett, a professor and director of religious studies at department of philosophy and religion at the University of Central Arkansas (UCA) says “all philosophical schools pay lip-service to critical thinking, but not all are capable of sustaining the practice of critical thinking.”

“In particular, the more a school or type of philosophy becomes the official philosophy, it tends to abandon its critical role and becomes an apologist,” Crockett tells the Tehran Times.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Q: Why do societies need critical thinking?

A: All societies require critical thinking to function. This critical thinking may take the explicit form of philosophy, or it may be more implicit and practical. But without the ability to reflect critically or questioningly about what a person or society is doing, there is no ability to change it or do otherwise. And this ability to change is intrinsic to the well-being and survival or a society.

Q: What is the role of philosophy in critical thinking?

A: Philosophy's main task should be critical thinking, as both method and goal. This is often the case for philosophical reflection, but at the same time professional philosophy answers to the demands of the state and the society to educate its people and to produce determinate and useful knowledge. In the former case, there is the temptation for philosophy to abandon its self-critical stance and serve whatever power or ideology is in place. In the latter, the danger is the quantification of knowledge in determinate ways along with the pressures to specialize and over-specialize, rendering most of philosophy's self-critical power impotent.

Q: Do you think all philosophical schools emphasize critical thinking?

A: All philosophical schools pay lip-service to critical thinking, but not all are capable of sustaining the practice of critical thinking. In particular, the more a school or type of philosophy becomes the official philosophy, it tends to abandon its critical role and becomes an apologist. No type of philosophy is immune to this tendency, so it becomes more helpful to look for situations where philosophy is more marginal in relation to state power and privilege while still having the resources to be aware and self-critical. This is why I have been so influenced by Continental philosophy in the U.S., because it is marginal in relation to the predominant Anglo-American analytic establishment. It's not that analytic philosophy is bad or not self-critical; it's just that insofar as analytic philosophy becomes the norm, it loses some of its critical edge.

Q: How can education system promote critical thinking?

A: The real crisis today is the role of education in our societies, as education becomes more and more complicit in consumerism and states and societies are financially constrained to privatize or cut back on educational resources. The enormous wealth of the USA after the Second World War enabled it to pursue an expansion of education, especially at the level of college or higher education. But this wealth is mostly spent, and more and more schools are desperately seeking new sources of income as well as treating students as consumers and in quantitative terms as revenue. These trends make critical thinking more and more difficult, even as we often still pay lip service to critical thinking as the heart of higher education. In our world today, the economic pressures combined with the speed of global media often make it difficult to slow down enough to think critically in a world that is so fast paced and evokes instant reactions.


*********Highlight*********

The real crisis today is the role of education in our societies, as education becomes more and more complicit in consumerism and states and societies are financially constrained to privatize or cut back on educational resources