The decline of critical thinking

A peoples of the world, Filipinos are the third “most ignorant” about their country’s key issues, after South Africans and Brazilians.

This is according to the Perils of Perception 2017 study, which surveyed 29,133 people from 38 countries on a wide range of subjects. These include murder and suicide rates, deaths resulting from terrorism, teenage pregnancies, foreign- born prisoners, health, religion, alcohol and sugar consumption, and Facebook and smartphones usage.

Despite giving inaccurate answers, the study’s Filipino respondents also ranked third among those who are most confident. This is explained by a behavioral anomaly called the “Dunning– Kruger effect.” It is a form of cognitive bias, in which people of little ability suffer from illusory superiority, manifested by overconfidence, that results from their lack of self- awareness and cognitive ability.

That the Philippines is ranked as the world’s 16th most ignorant country should worry us, for it signals the decline of our national cognition. I blame this on Filipinos’ worsening critical thinking skills. This is supported by employers I’ve talked to, who lamented their difficulty of finding employees who possess such skills. Another manifestation of this is social media discourse, which is full of nonsensical news and posts.

The Foundation for Critical Thinking defines critical think- ing as “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skilfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/ or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

In short, it is just the objective evaluation of an issue to form a judgment or conclusion.

What is vital about it is that this capability is developed during a person’s formative primary and secondary schooling. But Prof. Rolando de la Cruz, founder and president of the Darwin International School System, asserted that “the problem of lack of critical thinking among Filipino students goes way back, from Spanish colonial times, to the time of the Thomasites during