Farhad Dastur 2
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Humanist Voices, Unpublished)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/09/04
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: When it comes to critical thinking, which you are well acquainted with as an educator for over 20 years; what are your main tips?
Farhad Dastur: My first statement would be perhaps a controversial one or one that people haven’t thought about but I think there is a tension between critical thinking and creative thinking. Now, educators and others will often say we need to teach our students to be critical and creative thinkers as if those are somehow complimentary and I think they’re not complimentary at the same time. They are in a systematic way, in a way where there’s a process. And the reason I say that is I believe creative thinking is the putting together of disparate ways of looking facts observations in a way that has coherence and that solves some problem, whatever that problem is and it does it in a way that’s kind of unexpected and powerful.
Critical thinking is opposed to that way of doing it because it’s constantly seeking evidence. It’s constantly saying show me the proof, don’t go too far, there’s no evidence for that; it constrains your way of looking for pattern when in fact in most cases there isn’t but creative thinking is the opposite. It’s looking for pattern all the time. So, what I’d like for my students is to understand that these are different modalities of thought and you use them at different times. So, when you’re doing science, you probably want to start with creative thinking because something is bothering you intellectually and something doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense why giraffes have such long necks, right? Because there’s a lot of grass around. And why is it that a long neck could be actually quite dangerous in terms of being broken or when they drink water, they have to be quite vulnerable. So isn’t there a better way of doing this? So, at that stage of coming up with a hypothesis for the long neck, you don’t want to be critical; you want to be creative. You want to come up with some very radical new outlandish ideas, be playful in the putting together the construction of these notions.
Now when you have this outrageous hypothesis that everyone’s laughing at and saying it can’t be true or you’re out to lunch, now when you design the study to test the hypothesis; this is where you want to be critical because you want to now subject that crazy notion to all the tools of scepticism of confounding interpretations, of alternative explanations, of bias, etc., so that you can narrow in on an explanation that is resilient to these alternatives. So, critical thinking is absolutely important and necessary in terms of teaching students what it is and how to do it but the component that has been missing is what is its relation to creative thinking and when do you engage in it.
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