I read an article recently that suggested that it is not possible to teach students how to think critically. We have critical and creative thinking as part of our Graduate Profile so are we being misguided in including critical thinking in the Profile? I think not.

The history of good thinking in Western civilization contains many examples of thinkers who believed that being able to think critically is an important part of how we live life well. It may be something that a few people have as a natural gifting but it is a skill everyone can learn. It has certainly been identified as one of the essential skills for the twenty-first century. While educators have often talked of education helping students to think critically, sadly, in many Western nations, education in the past 100 years or so has been reduced to knowledge transmission and regurgitation. In the NSW curriculum for example, teachers are required to ensure students have such a significant amount of curriculum content that it leaves little time to explore that and ask questions of it – to critique it.

Critical and creative thinking is grounded in the ability to ask good questions and to see things differently. By using the imagination we can investigate the underlying beliefs and assumptions that any piece of knowledge contains. An artist for example looking at a landscape may consider it from many different perspectives and look beyond the photographic details to what a landscape may tell us of the people, its history and even an imagined future for the scene. A creative artist explores the landscape through various media – watercolour, oil, pastels etc, all of which may help to bring different ideas through the work of art.

All ideas are grounded in a world view that is shaped by a person’s beliefs, experiences, culture and so on. A critical thinker can explore these background elements and assess them from different angles. They ask questions of the ideas and assumptions and challenge their common understanding. These are activities that can be taught and explored by students, even very young ones.

The danger is that critical thinking is now used to question everything negatively rather than seek to discover the truth or falsehood of something. Much of this thinking is used to push us towards a single understanding rather than allow room for various understandings. At GPCC, we want our students to learn to think critically and creatively as they explore the world and themselves and to reach valid conclusions based on reasonable evidence and processes.

Within the confines of the NSW curriculum, we are finding ways to help our students explore ideas in a way that challenges assumptions and opens up fresh understandings while seeking to ground all this in the idea that God, who created the world, is the source of all truth and ultimately the search will lead us back to Him.

Phillip Nash

Principal