Bertrand Russell (May 18th, 1872 \u2013 February 2nd, 1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician, pacifist, humanitarian, Nobel laureate, linguist, humanist, social activist and political prisoner (among other things). At heart, however, he was a teacher, holding teaching positions at The London School of Economics and Cambridge, traveling the world as a visiting lecturer, and even founding his own school, Beacon Hill in West Sussex, in 1927.<\/p>\n
In 1951 he wrote an article, originally for The New York Times, in which he set out his teaching manifesto. In it he described what he referred to as his \u2018Liberal Decalogue\u2019 (1)<\/strong>: \u201cThe Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:<\/p>\n Russell was taking aim at both teachers and students. For a teacher, it is obvious that you can\u2019t help students to become critical thinkers unless you are one yourself. Unfortunately, not many of us really are. For some teachers, being critical involves moaning about the current curriculum or education policies. For others the pressure of the job means that telling students what they should think rather than how they should think (understandable given that modern curricula are, by definition, content driven). According to Russell, critical thinking is not a skill that can really be learned (or, for that matter, taught). A thirst for knowledge takes care of that.<\/p>\n Some time ago I had a conversation with my ex-headmaster in which he told me his thoughts about the way education is likely to evolve. He believed (and, I\u2019m sure, still does) that in the future teachers will no longer have the responsibility to impart knowledge. Knowledge will exist elsewhere \u2013 specifically on the internet \u2013 and teachers will instead be required only to teach skills (or perhaps be mercifully replaced by a microchip). Students will be freer to concentrate on the subjects that interest them and those that are more useful for their chosen career. We will then produce societies of subject specialists.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This may well come to pass. However, in my view it has profound implications for the future of critical thinking. Firstly, the externalisation of knowledge is reminiscent of European society prior to the Renaissance. At that time (before the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas), the population at large was happy to leave [religious] knowledge in the hands of the Church, and the Church was only too happy to be its custodian. Does acceptance that knowledge should be left in the hands of others really represent progress? After all, many teachers would say they are currently fighting a losing battle against insidious ‘wikipediaism’. It is becoming increasingly easy to regurgitate knowledge without actually digesting any of it. Secondly, will the society of the future be made of people with very specific skills but very little general knowledge? At the very least, that would make games of trivial pursuit rather boring. At worst, if Bertrand Russell is to be believed, a lack of personal knowledge would lead to the loss of our society\u2019s ability to think critically.<\/p>\n Interestingly, Russell pre-empted the ideas of my old boss by some eighty years. He was worried about the pressure that society at that time was putting on students to learn skills rather than gain knowledge and made an impassioned defense of \u2018useless knowledge\u2019 in an essay he published in 1935 (2)<\/strong>. He defended the assimilation of knowledge for its own sake, the satisfaction that learning brings and the danger that a lack of knowledge poses to society. It was, of course, a product of the time in which he was writing – Europe had been through a war less than a generation before, and Nazism was on the rise. Russell was a pacifist (at that time) and a fervent opponent of fascism. He felt that the rise of Hitler and increased militarism was brought about by lack of knowledge within the German populace and the suppression of critical thinking by the individual and the State.<\/p>\n Today, as part of the IB Diploma, we teach a subject called Theory of Knowledge. It is at the heart of the philosophy of the IB and I feel is generally misunderstood by teachers, students and parents. [One woman in Upstate New York has dedicated her life to denouncing it as the work of the devil on her website \u2018truthaboutib.com\u2019]. The idea of the course is to instill a lifelong awareness of the importance of critical thinking. Laudable, perhaps, but I would say impossible to teach properly. Critical thinking, if you take any of my thoughts above seriously, comes from within the individual \u2013 according to Russell through a love of gathering knowledge and discussion of it with others. Most importantly, I think, it comes from embracing and assimilating the ideas that Russell laid out in his \u2018Liberal Decalogue\u2019 (still worthy of appearing on a cartulina on any Edron classroom wall).<\/p>\n References<\/u><\/p>\n\n