Even My Textbook Agrees That Critical Literacy is Not the Same Thing As Critical Thinking

 

I have previously argued that critical thinking is not the same thing as critical theory. The following is from the education textbook Content Area Literacy and it seems to take a similar line. 

Note that critical literacy is embedded with being culturally conscious. Make no mistake. Being culturally conscious here does not mean not making fun of a student for things like their clothes or accent. Instead, it is a willingness to define students based on their culture. According to the textbook:

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with trying to run a classroom that values respect, harmony, and cooperation as opposed to competition. It is quite possible that Native-American students are more likely to benefit from such a class. That being said, assuming that individual Native-American students are not inclined toward competition reeks of the same racist obtuseness of a sports coach trying to recruit those same Native-American students because of their people's "natural warrior spirit." Students should be treated as individuals and teachers should attempt to provide the best style of education they can for each student regardless of their culture. 

Furthermore, culture is only relevant if the student decides that it is. It is possible that our Native-American student despises everything about Native-American culture and wishes to become a Scotsman. Perhaps their love for cooperation has led them to become fanatical followers of Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. That is their right and the teacher should respect that. There should be no assumption that just because a student is ethnically Native-American that being Native-American has any relevance to their lives. In truth, I am skeptical about the deep commitment of most kids to any minority culture in the absence of someone else consciously making an issue about it. In my experience, kids, being kids, have other things on their minds. This is to say nothing of them having a worked-out theory about how their culture affects things like their competitiveness. If parents wish to raise their children with a cultural identity that is well and good. I see no reason, as a teacher, why this should be any of my business. What I care about is their ability to use the historical method.     

This emphasis on cultural groups serves as the basis for the politics of critical reading. Critical thinking is fundamentally an apolitical act. It is a useful tool to justify telling people with ideologies to shove it so that they leave you alone. As a historian, I am constantly aware that texts were written by people with an agenda. We do not have all perspectives. For example, we lack Cathar voices as the thirteenth-century French monarchy backed by Catholic Church wiped them out. We certainly need to be careful with what our Catholic sources have to say about the Cathars. Since we lack Cathar sources, we should try to imagine what Cathar sources might say if we had them. Beyond a certain skepticism of people in power, who are likely to produce source material, there is a little in the way of practical political lessons to take from studying the Cathars.

One can make a good case that studying the Cathars has little relevance to the lives of students. In truth, that is a reason to teach Cathar History. A great virtue of studying history and a reason why we should be teaching it is precisely its disassociation from real life. In a similar vein, this is a reason to expose students to literature and theater. We want students to step out of themselves and imagine an outside perspective like Smith's impartial observer. This is an essential part of being a rational individual. Other people, not being you, cannot be relied upon to understand or sympathize with your personal truth. What can cross the divide to other minds is reason. The historical method is a set of rules that all people can embrace in order to achieve a baseline agreed-upon reality. 

By contrast, critical reading is highly political. It is not just that our sources do a better job covering the perspectives of wealthy, educated men; other groups have been silenced, implying that the authors of our sources have wronged others by the mere fact that they wrote something down. Furthermore, we are, somehow, implicated in that crime by using the sources most easily available to us. For example, we might imagine that the very act of being a primary source about the Cathars makes someone complicit in their destruction. Furthermore, someone like me, a Jew, am somehow to blame for the lack of Cathar sources. By using Catholic sources, I link my soul to the Inquisition. Keep in mind that, for critical theory, oppression has nothing to do with physically hurting anyone. You are an oppressor merely through some kind of association with an oppressive structure. If you benefit from oppression and fail to acknowledge and denounce that benefit to the satisfaction of critical theorists, you are an oppressor. 

As I understand the argument, it is because of this taint that history has not been fair in terms of both its reality and surviving sources that we have the responsibility to work for social justice. Using our classes as platforms to promote social justice allows us to atone for our insufficient teaching of non-white male history. One might ask how are students supposed to work for any kind of justice if they have been brought to that position by a study of history tainted by a desire to turn them into activists? Keep in mind that the central premise of the historical method is that the very fact that a historical source was written to support a claim makes it useless for advancing that very claim. By contrast, we readily believe sources when they undermine their original intention. For example, we do not believe our Catholic sources that tell us that Cathars conducted sex-rites. That being said, we do believe those same sources when they imply that people were attracted to Cathars by the personal piety of Cathar clergy.  

Students can take what I teach them about history seriously precisely to the extent that it has nothing to do with their lives. I honestly have no idea what studying Cathar history has to do with voting for an American political party. My job is to teach people how to process historical information. To do that job well, I cannot be doing anything else. The moment I try to do more, I risk doing nothing and being nothing more than a waste of my student's time.