Dr Lambert and critical thinking
IT IS perhaps true that Jamaicans are not given to critical thinking, so they readily imbibe the populist spiels of politicians and others who hold power. On that matter, we defer to Clement Lambert, a lecturer at the School of Education at the University of the West Indies, at Mona.
“...We have to be persons who can process what is being said, but I don’t think successive governments have done enough to promote media literacy and information literacy,” Dr Lambert told a forum hosted by this newspaper last week.
Our concern is that Dr Lambert’s solution seems to be the Jamaican default: look to the government for the solution. In that regard, Dr Lambert may well have opened himself to accusations of precisely what he complained about: a deficit of critical thinking. Or, perhaps more accurately, he has a responsibility to address the question of what he and people like him are doing about the problem.
Dr Lambert teaches at the English-speaking Caribbean’s foremost academic institution, which is expected to be an environment of intellectual ferment and a bastion of critical thinking. But, more critically, he is assigned to an agency of that institution that trains teachers and education researchers. They, in turn, help shape the teachers and students of Jamaica’s classrooms.
On the face of it, it is difficult to blame politicians, parsons, educators, journalists and business leaders for manipulating the citizenry because of its inability to think critically without an implied criticism of the academies of learning and training, whose graduates were deficient in these skills, had failed to pass them on, or had not engaged the society in a manner and at the level where the critical questioning of ideas is common.
To be fair to Dr Lambert, his intervention in this matter provided an opening for an ongoing public engagement, outside the narrow confines of academia, by the agency of which he is a member, to discuss the problems he has identified and its contribution to their soulutions.