Modern life is accelerating towards greater complexity and individuals need some basic critical thinking skills to navigate the rapidly shifting landscape in which the world operates, not a uniquely Nigerian problem.
In a recent post attributed to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a social justice activist and six-time NBA champion, he argued that majority of American adults get their news from social media. During the 2016 election in the US, malicious fake news stories were more popular and shared more often on Facebook than legitimate headlines. A similar situation obtains in Nigeria too.
Peter Okebukola, chairman, Crawford University governing council and former executive secretary of the Nigerian Universities Commission (NUC), said, “Critical thinking skills are very important 21st Century skills. They are a broad spectrum of skills needed to survive in the world today. They include ability to play well in a team, creativity, and innovation. To promote critical thinking skills we need a curriculum that would foster the development of such skills. A curriculum that is overloaded by teachers and aims to cover the syllabus leads to cramming or rote learning.”
Philips Consulting Education and Employability Survey report of 2014 showed that 98 percent of employers rate verbal and written communication, ability to work in teams, critical and analytical reasoning as desirable qualities in graduates they are looking for.
Sixty per cent of employers do not think tertiary institutions are doing a good job of producing successful graduate employees. Sixty-nine percent of employers believe that collaboration with tertiary institutions is important, especially through participation in internship programmes, 52 percent have never collaborated with institutions in curriculum design, while 48 percent have never participated in graduate recruitment programmes with universities.
“Educational institutions at primary, secondary, and post-secondary are largely the products of technology infrastructure and social circumstances of the past. The landscape has changed and the educational institutions should consider how to adapt quickly in response. Employers are dissatisfied with the current level of new graduates’ inability to work on their own, as well as with their critical and analytical ability” Tope Toogun, CEO, Accelerated Learning Systems, said.
A healthy democracy depends on knowledgeable discourse for survival, but our national conversation is incessantly muddied. Information is twisted, contorted and butchered — so much so, that Nigerians struggle to reach informed decisions about which policies or politicians to support. In order to arm citizens with the ability to distinguish truth from falsehood, a diligent implementation of critical thinking into Nigeria’s basic education system is critical for survival.
“For the quality of thinking to improve, the quality of questions asked must change. We ask students lower order questions such as, name, explain, define and list. These forms of questions asked in our classrooms do not lead to critical thinking” Folasade Adefisayo, lead consultant, Lead Learning Nigeria Limited, an educational services company told BusinessDay.
“Let me give you an example. When I went to study in the United Kingdom for a post graduate degree in biology, we were given the diagram of a human eye to examine and determine what was wrong with it. In Nigeria, we would probably have been asked to draw and label a human eye” Adefisayo said.
Some have argued that critical thinking should be taught the same way a language is taught, through constant practical use and repetition until students are fluent. Starting in junior secondary, every student should have a formal class that teaches how to identify logical fallacies that may come from the Internet, media, authority figures or even textbooks.
Other classes would then include practical applications of critical thinking, according to the subject. English classes would examine fictional characters’ logic in their motivations. Non-fiction essays would be studied to show flaws and strengths in logical persuasion. And history classes would analyse political speeches from current and historical leaders for signs of emotional manipulation.
Teachers need to emphasise how to think, not what to think. Students need to learn to acknowledge that their opinions are formed from a plethora of influences: parents, religion, peers, friends, teachers, government and so forth. They must be taught to be aware of these influences and to evaluate both sides of an argument before coming to a conclusion.
Odumosu Omolara, CEO, Class Climax Consulting, suggested, “our children are not thinking out of the box anymore. They are not working for real life solutions to problems. Knowledge when it is not in its application form is not knowledge and this is the essence of critical thinking skills in schools.
“Students should be able to apply the knowledge they acquire. Analytical skills have to be taught right from foundation years. When students are taught to reason from childhood, they are primed to go the extra mile in problem solving skills necessary to for the actualisation of sustainable development” she said.
“Children should be taught to learn on their own. Rote learning is not knowledge. All the subjects and topics in the curriculum should be reviewed in a way and manner that would help students to translate ideas into real life situations. Learning should be in-depth; the curriculum should have subjects tailored towards solving real life problems. There should be an extension activity to every subject and every topic.”
Current systems of standardised testing are illusions of progress and accountability. They do not measure students’ intellectual capabilities, so much as they measure their ability to take tests.
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