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Another interesting topic choice for the weekly #Edchat event on Twitter. But before we can answer the question how we can assess students we might have to assess if we as teachers are still in the position to think critical.

Critical thinking is a complex thing in itself. It needs an open mind and you have to question everyone and everything, including yourself, every day. But all too often we start to take assumptions for reality and this is only one way we can fail in critical thinking. It needs constant training, reevaluation of your own position and openness to new input and sources.

In some cases we can only come close to a result for example when we evaluate historic events. You would need to take the mindset of the people into consideration who lived back then, the events that surrounded them, the society etc. This is nearly impossible especially if we are talking about the antique or the middle ages. Hence critically evaluating a source or an event in that time can only be an approximation to the facts.

The other problem is our personality, our believes and thinking patterns. David Eddings an American author explained it pretty well in the preface of one of his books. We tend to subconciously think that people with an opposite position are not as smart as we are because we are standing on the correct position whereas we tend to see people who agree with our position as being equally smart. Hence if a student would come to another conclusion after considering the evidence and checking the fact than we did there is the chance that we assess him/her as being not able to think critical.

Third problem is that critical thinking is not popular anymore. For decades we can see a the decline in the media. Critical journalism is more and more a niche phenomenon or needs to be sugar coated with comedy in order to reach a broader audience. But of course this is watering down the key message. Media became more and more a distribution channel for governments. This is true in Europe, Germany, France and of course Italy in particular and the United States. Governments don’t want critical thinkers as they are causing problems all the time as they are evaluating the sources all the time.

If you just take 15 minutes and start thinking of recent stories in the news and then start to connect the dots it is absolutely not understandable why governments get through with what they do. It is often so obvious that it almost hurts.

Doctor Jeff Goldstein said it best at the end of last week’s #Edchat

The current state of events around the globe speaks louder than words about the value of critical thinking in our society.