Analysis and Application vs. Critical Thinking

Students, faculty, administrators, critics of higher education, and its proponents all seem to be questioning everything about higher education from its cost and public funding to the future of tenure and shift toward more professional majors. While many things underlie these debates, one unspoken issue is whether universities should be teaching students to become skilled in applying or analyzing a fairly narrow range of issues or problems that relate to a particular field (sometimes called a major) or become good communicators, critical thinkers, and engaged citizens (what Andrew Mills calls the swiss army approach to education - see http://faculty.otterbein.edu/Amills/MillsCollegeEssay.html).



Of course, by framing things in this way, I have created a false binary. The reality is more complex than this simplistic either/or. However, the public dialogue seems to also rely on this binary when approaching the question of the purpose of higher education, mostly because the graduates skilled in certain kinds of analysis or application possess identifiable and relatively easy to market skills.



Consider professional majors, such as accounting, architecture, or education. These majors claim to provide students with the ability to apply basic principles in those fields. While many folks have tried to get these fields to focus on communication, citizenship, and critical thinking, the meat and potatoes classes in these majors are focused on how to solve concrete problems facing practitioners and function as members of the profession. Moreover, based on what I have heard from my traditional-aged students is that they like this kind of "hands on" focus. To succeed in these programs, students need to learn how to analyze problems and how to apply. From my own experience in law school, developing the ability to "think like a lawyer" was probably the most difficult academic task I ever experienced and made graduate school relatively "easy" by comparision to law school.



Yet, this is not the same thing as becoming a critical thinker. A critical thinker goes beyond analysis or application and interrogates the existing categories, structures, paradigms, and procedures. (I don't want to rehash all the great stuff about critical thinking at criticalthinking.org/. Their stuff is great - you should check it out). A critical thinker respects the immense value of being able to apply a concept or engage in a specific kind of analysis, but also explores the limits of a given paradigm or approach. Critical thinking considers the approach's assumptions and consequences. It looks for what gets omitted or neglected. It also asks questions about who benefits from the standard approach.



My own journey to a Ph.D. in American Studies, I think, reflects my allegiance to a broad area of inquiry over a specific disciplinary allegiance. In other words, by choosing an interdisciplinary program, I explicitly rejected the idea that only one method, discipline, or paradigm can produce adequate knowledge. For better or worse, this has left me a "jack of many trades but master of none." I realize that not everyone shares my assumptions or my values, so I hesitate to foist it upon the masses.



That being said, I find it odd that many partisans in the debates about higher education want higher education to become an either/or kind of place where students either analysis/application or critical thinking. From my point of view, the application/analysis seems to be winning this debate, but I think at a huge cost. I am not sure that we can afford to focus only analysts or folks specializing in application. On the other hand, focusing on critical thinking or citizenship without some sort of specialized skill or knowledge does not produce the kind of creativity, entreprenurial sprirt, or engage citizens we need. It seems like we need to create institutions of higher education that can do both and do both well.

For students, I think this means coming to grips with the fact that college is both about learning employable skills and the awareness about their limitations and/or flaws. As I tell my students, high school is about identifying the difference between "black" and "white," while college is about navigativing in the "grey area."

For professors, administrators, and pundits, embracing the difference between analysis and critical thinking and valuing both is probably the only way to strengthen our institutions and help students achieve their goals.