“Critical thinking” has been a common phrase in education for more than a quarter century, but it can be a slippery concept to define. Perhaps because “critical” is an adjective with certain negative connotations (e.g., “You don’t have to be so critical” or “Everybody’s a critic”), people sometimes think that critical thinking is a fault-finding exercise or that there is nothing creative about it. But defined fairly and fully, critical thinking is in fact a precondition to creativity.

Critical thinkers consider multiple sides of an issue before choosing sides. They tend to ask questions instead of accepting everything they hear or read, and they know that answers often only open up more lines of inquiry. Critical thinkers read between the lines instead of reading only at face value, and they also develop a keen sense of how their own minds operate. Critical thinkers recognize that much of the information they read and hear is a combination of fact and opinion. To be successful in college, you will have to learn to differentiate between fact and opinion through logic, questioning, and verification. Facts are pieces of information that you can verify as true. Opinions are personal views or beliefs that may have very little grounding in fact. Since opinions are often put forth as if they were facts, they can be challenging to recognize as opinions. That’s where critical thinkers tend to keep questioning. It is not enough to question only the obviously opinionated material in a text. Critical thinkers develop a habit of subjecting all textual statements to a whole constellation of questions about the speaker (or writer), the intended audience, the statement itself, and the relevance of it.

Considering the speaker:

• Who is making the statement?

• What are the speaker’s affiliations?

• How does the speaker know the truth of this statement?

Considering the audience:  

• Who is being addressed with this statement?
• What could connect the speaker of the statement with the intended audience?
• Would all people consider this statement to be true?

Considering the statement:

• Can this statement be proven?
• Will this statement also be true tomorrow or next year?
• If this statement is true, what else might be true?
• Are there other possible interpretations of the facts behind this statement?

Considering relevance:  

• What difference does this statement make?
• Who cares (and who should care)?
• So what? What now? What’s next?

Examining the Status Quo:

Why are you here?

The question sounds simple enough, and you may well have developed some stock answers by now.

I’m here because…

• I want to be a ______________ when I grow up.

• college graduates make more money.

• my parents wanted me to go here.

• my boyfriend or girlfriend got accepted here.

• I couldn’t get in anywhere else.

Maybe the truth is, deep down, that you don’t really know yet why you’re here, and that’s OK. By the end of your college experience, you’ll have developed several good answers for why you were here, and they won’t necessarily look anything like your first stock response. But what does this personal question about your motivations for being in college have to do with examining the status quo? Well, the first way to learn how to examine the status quo (literally, “the state in which”) is to examine your place in it.

By enrolling in higher education, you’re making a choice to develop your skills and intellect beyond a baseline level of proficiency. Choosing to become a college-educated person obligates you to leave your mark on the world. You’re investing time and money into your college education, presumably for the real benefits it will provide you, but it’s important to remember that others are investing in you as well. Perhaps family members are providing financial support, or the federal government is providing a Pell Grant or a low-interest loan, or an organization or alumni group is awarding you a scholarship. If you’re attending a state school, the state government is investing in you because your tuition (believe it or not) covers only a small portion of the total cost to educate you. So what is the return a free, independent, evolving society expects on its investment in you, and what should you be asking of yourself? Surely something more than mere maintenance of the status quo should be in order. Rather, society expects you to be a member of a college-educated citizenry and workforce capable of improving the lives and lot of future generations.

Getting into the habit of “examining” (or even “challenging”) the status quo doesn’t necessarily mean putting yourself into a constant state of revolution or rebellion. Rather, the process suggests a kind of mindfulness, a certain disposition to ask a set of questions about your surroundings:

• What is the status quo of _________? (descriptive)
• Why is _______ the way it is? (diagnostic)
• What (or who) made ________ this way? (forensic)
• Was _______ ever different in the past? (historical)
• Who benefits from keeping ______ the way it is? (investigative)

Only after these relatively objective questions have been asked, researched, and answered might you hazard a couple of additional, potentially more contentious questions:

• How could or should ______ be different in the future? (speculative)
• What steps would be required to make _______ different? (policy based)

These last two types of questions are more overtly controversial, especially if they are applied to status-quo practices that have been in place for many years or even generations. But asking even the seemingly benign questions in the first category will directly threaten those forces and interests that benefit most from the preservation of the status quo. You will encounter resistance not only from this already powerful group but also from reformers with competing interests who have different opinions about where the status quo came from or how it should be changed.