Voice in the wilderness for thinking revolution

THE EDITOR: As I listened to a prominent High Court judge calling for a “revolution” in thinking from his congregation at the Marabella Presbyterian Church last weekend, I shook my head in ambivalence, recognising the importance of what he was saying, yet knowing his call would likely have little effect.

I presume to equate his “revolution in thinking” with taking a critical approach to issues, interrogating them rather than merely accepting them at face value in order to arrive at an informed position on the subject at hand.

Such “critical thinking” is what I would have delivered to students at UTT, Port of Spain, reading for the bachelor’s degree in fashion and design, and would have seen the impact in transforming students from merely accepting the content related to the course to asking questions about such content, as, for example, the suitability of cosmopolitan designs to the Caribbean environment and of “conventional” colour mixes to the mood and psyche of Caribbean peoples, to name just two.

In effect, what emerged was a student who could exercise greater initiative and creativity, recognising the value of “foreign” but being able to produce something characteristic of ourselves rather than mere “copy-catting.” Gone were the days of the student, well armed with his impressive-looking UTT file, ready to take down every word carte blanche from the lecturer. There was now a new kid on the block ready to take on the world by asking questions about it.

I have used this elaborate illustration to show that a critical approach to issues — a “revolution in thinking” as the judge would have it — is the pathway to true cognitive development in students, and would this have been applied to all disciplines, like a law student asking how just a law is rather merely applying it to “win a case.” Or science students questioning the ethics of drilling in a pristine environment like the Arctic as against the mere economics of it. Or one asking about Columbus as hero when considering the destruction he brought to the New World, inter alia.

Would the net effect not have been an emerging society keen to ask questions about the world to better understand it and to be able to make informed decisions regarding issues which arise?

But sadly, teaching has traditionally been “telling” and learning has been “collecting” and “regurgitating,” and our students have never been stimulated to interrogate the world around them. Is it any wonder, then, that the judge’s congregation, emerging from such a system, would hardly respond to his call?

This disinclination to apply critical thought is no more evident than in the politics where supporters in red or yellow never really ask questions of those who lead them, cases in point being the appointment of a relative novice to a key position in an international body with no questions in the first case, and in the second similarly so, with the prospect of a newcomer, baggage and all, set to replace senior members of long standing in a key position.

Bound up in the cocoon of their divided ethnicities, they willingly participate in their own subordination, and this blind loyalty, with no questions asked, is fodder for our leaders who see them as mere pawns in the game of power. But the judge’s call, “a voice in the wilderness” as it may appear, is significant, for it shows that not all of us are pawns in this game.

Dr ERROL BENJAMIN, docbenj742@outlook.com