Critical Thinking Theory & Media

We cannot simply accept what we read on the WWW, or in other media, as truth.

Incorporating new data into practice requires filtering, development, adoption and the goodwill of all stakeholders. To simply accept data as knowledge is wrong. We must critically reflect on this information, and, with experience, wisdom, discourse we can move closer to truth and enlightenment.

We must explore truth as we understand it, to come to a better understanding of ourselves and our world. We must question what we perceive as truth, take it out and hold it up to the light in the presence of others to approach enlightenment.

There is some discussion, by Steve Paikin on The Agenda, Politics in the Classroom, around Stanley Fish's book, Save the World on Your Own Time. What many of the profs were saying is that we must encourage students to arrive at highler level thinking skills, not as vessels to be filled, but as thinking sentient human beings whose thinking processes must be honed and shaped. They need to be exposed to consistent, valid, supported arguments, and this, I believe, is true of all media expressions.

Students come to class "laden with unexamined opinions, which lead to fuzzy thinking.", said Kerry Borman*. And I agree. I believe that all editors must examine the opinions that more and more journalists mask as news reports and aim for unbiased, fact-based information that balances the three aspects of truth: my view, your view, and the truth.

Margaret Wente, in a response to the arbitrated York U. strike, makes some telling comments about university, its purpose, the lack of professors teaching, and tenured professors intentions in this age of technology and information. As I wrote to one prof, we still have dinosaurs who teach as if we are in the Hunting & Gathering Age, and have failed to adapt and adopt to the needs of society as it stands. Partly I think it due to the structure of these institutions, also, to the mistake that all of us need a university education to make our way in this world.

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*Kerry Bowman is an assistant professor in family and community medicine at the University of Toronto, and a bioethicist the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics.

Fact versus Fiction

I have been listening with great interest to the CBC Ideas program on How To Think About Science। I am tired of the Man in the Street interviews in which fiction is taken as fact and misinformation presented and held up as reality. This kind of information is delivered to an acquiescent public. How knowledge is produced, designed in social context, presented by mass markets, is not necessarily for scientific purposes. Even breast cancer websites are risk for the average consumer.

We know that social and economic interests shape research topics, methods and have bias, including ‘scientific’ research। Results are delivered to a public that does not examine it for accuracy. We believe a lot of what we see and read. Media owes a great responsibility to informing the public in a way that presents information, not heresay.

Reliability and validity are not buzzwords for any politicians I know. Nor do they factor into much of that which we read online. We know, too, that the Americans shape Canadian policies, or try to. Homeland Security has continued to direct Canadian transportation policy and procedures. I follow, with great interest, the Fair Copyright for Canada.

We must be vigilant and remain firm in our convictions. In Canada the geopolitical climate differs from that of the United States (Gwyn, 1995), and does not include the traditional ‘right to bear arms’, or ‘rugged individualism’, rampant in some areas of the country, with heavy-handed applications of either the Quran or the Bible affecting the values of business and government agencies and NGOs.

Canadian viewpoints must be presented in the Global Village. We think and act differently. That said, many of those who conduct interviews on some of my favourite media stations, tend to miss out the p oint of the interview. They like to talk explore issues about how a person ‘feels’ about an horrific event and talk around the topic. With no new information, the topic is pursued with the vigour of a dog and a bone. Some much presented as news is simply a reaction to news already broadcast. Is there nothing going on in the world that we must examine how one feels after losing a family member, or their house to disaster?