By Oweyegha-Afunaduula
Critical thinking skills are important in many areas of human endeavour. From time immemorial critical thinking was the hallmark of education. Ancient Greek Philosophers emphasized it as the ultimate product of the educational process. Critical thinking is recognized as key in any society.
The key critical thinking skills are analytic reasoning, problem-solving, open-mindedness, inference, communication without fear or favour, decision-making, solving problems systematically, identifying a problem and issue at hand, research, evaluation, adaptability, analysis, curiosity, argument, gathering relevant information, evaluating arguments and recognising fallacies and/or biases
Critical thinking and reasoning are important skills in education that help students develop the ability to analyze, evaluate, and solve problems. When students graduate without these skills, it will be reflected in society when they become integral to the Executive, Legislature and Judiciary, wor when they become heads of institutions or when they become leaders and administrators in local-level governments.
In today’s world, where everyone can publish information, true or false, we must learn how to navigate through the overwhelming amount of information available in today’s digital age. Here are a few reasons you should develop your critical thinking skills (Nelly Kgoadi-Molaba, 2023). Critical thinking can indeed be taught throughout an education system so that there is a cadre of citizens who can think critically and reason coherently before taking any action or decision
I have written widely about the need to re-orient our education system to begin producing graduates who can engage in all aspects of critical thinking and reasoning and question what their leaders and rulers desire of them before making decisions or taking action. Besides, leaders and rulers who have passed through our education system are incapacitated in terms of thinking and reasoning or analysing problems and issues. They end up using their senses rather than their mental faculties. Emotional rather than intelligent responses to challenges become their method of governance impregnated by militaristic strategies to generate fear among the people they lead or rule. This is unfortunate. Those under them, because they passed through the same education, will tend to worship or embrace everything the bosses suggest or do without questioning. They will help build a worship and doing society critically short of critical thinkers and people who can reason as a way of life.
Sometimes people who have not been to school think critically and reason far more effectively than those who have received education at the highest level in our education system. Yet these are the ones that are populating every department and institution of the State. They are our Ministers, legislators and judges. They are likely to favour the command-obey approach to governance and to glorify military leaders who, by virtue of training and profession, have their critical thinking and reasoning skills either removed or stunted in favour of muscle and iron. hence the Command-Obey approach supersedes the Negotiated Approach to governance, which demands effective critical thinking and reasoning skills.
In my diverse writings on education in recent times, I have decried the over-dependence of our education system on the colonial disciplinary teaching and learning styles, which assume that the teacher knows it all and the student knows nothing. I have reasoned that this approach is the reason why critical thinking and reasoning are becoming pollutants in our education system. What is the use of continuing to produce graduates at the highest level of education in the disciplines that are not comfortable with critical thinking and reasoning? I have advocated for our university campuses to open up to interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinary and extra-disciplinary education instead of their preferred multidisciplinary education, which does not challenge disciplinary education but just entrenches it, and serves to prevent the emergence of alternative education on university campuses.
Unfortunately, our universities, mostly a carry-over from the 20th century, have recently re-emphasized disciplinary education in a century, which demands knowledge reintegration and integration rather than knowledge splitting and knowledge adding. They continue to produce and reward graduates in small knowledge in the disciplines. In times of politics as the most lucrative employer in Uganda, many, especially in the social science and the humanities, are flocking into that profession, ostensibly to provide leadership, yet the main aim is to make money by converting public money to personal money and to build mansions for themselves and/or individual endowment at the expense of the public interest. They are not only victims of the education system but also President Tibuhaburwa Museveni’s individual merit approach to politics (i.e., leadership and governance).
One thing is true! Students who have been exposed to interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, transdisciplinarity and extra-disciplinary teaching and learning can evaluate complex problems and to suggest solutions to them. As Sudderth has surmised, interdisciplinarity supports critical thinking by helping students to understand multiple viewpoints, evaluate conflicting perspectives and build structural knowledge (Oweyegha-Afunaduula, 2023, 2023). They have advanced critical thinking and reasoning skills.
If we had a cadre of graduates in the more advanced knowledge production and application arenas of interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity, they would be able to evaluate the numerous government projects, programmes or institutions that have been launched without much critical thinking and reasoning but ended up collapsing or being removed after consuming enormous amounts of taxpayers‘ money..
Ester Katende (2023) investigated the nature of critical thinking in the curriculum content of institutions of higher learning in Uganda, with particular reference to Makerere University Business School. She concluded that to a small extent, critical thinking is prevalent in the documents of the institution of higher learning analyzed but that a lot more can be done.
Mauro Giocomazzi, Luisa Zecca and Liliana Maggion (2023) have also written that the Ugandan system of education is not helping students to become critical thinkers; the education is superficial and uncritically based on rote learning.
Besides, most education reviews in Uganda have not bee geared towards creating a body of graduates at all levels of education who cannot think critically or reason but are amenable to being told to do or not do and they just comply. That is a slave mentality or mind. It is intellectual poverty. It is a disaster when most graduates of the education system have a slave mentality or mind and suffer from intellectual poverty. Yet as our universities emphasize academicism and scholasticism at the expense of intellectual development, this is precisely the product of the education system. Such product is what continues to flock into leadership and governance, at a time when we need future-ready professionals from the alternative knowledge productive systems.
Hopefully, the current Uganda Education Review Commission, under former Minister of Education, Amanya Mushega, will not be ensuring power retention by the powers that be, but to make our education system capable of producing a large cadre of graduates at all levels of education who can think critically, reason coherently and question everything before saying yes or know. An education system that can not arm the society with a critical mass of critical thinkers is a burden in a Century demanding reintegration and integration of knowledge -processes that are driven by critical thinking and reasoning.
For God and My Country.
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