Over at
The Linguist, Steve's been looking at
critical thinking and
freedom of speech. Notes Steve, those who mean well are often the quickest to want both to
teach critical thinking and to
limit the freedom of speech. This, to me, is like teaching someone to make cookies but forbidding them from acquiring flour and chocolate chips: free speech is the raw material on which one exercises one's critical faculties in a free society.
On the question of critical thinking, I think there's a very basic misconception which leads all sorts of well-meaning people astray: critical thinking is not always a tool for arriving at the
right answer so much as a means of finding the right answer for you. If I love to work with my hands and am therefore contemplating becoming an accountant - I'll get to push pencils all day! - critical thinking may cause me to reexamine my premises and become a mechanic or a sculptor instead. In the larger scheme of things, likewise, critical thinking will not tell us whether we should invade Iraq, have national health care or criminalize duck hunting. Absolute answers to these questions don't exist. Critical thinking may, however, help a nation decide whether the decision it makes is congruent with the kind of nation its people want it to be.
Robert Heinlein noted that if it can't be expressed in figures, it's opinion, not fact. But that's countered by the old quip that figures don't lie but liars figure. Most often, the liars who are figuring start by lying to themselves. The other day, a colleague remarked that another person in the company had gone about things the wrong way, perhaps, but that he meant well. I breezily chirped in that Hitler had meant well too, but things could have turned out better where he was involved. I was surprised by the vociferousness with which the response came: "He did not!" To this person, it was inconceivable that a person she conceived of as being evil could have had any intention other than to go down in history as synonymous with cruelty, barbarism and megalomania. This is usually the response I get because if even Hitler meant well, people sense, that means that it's not good enough that their own intentions are good. They also have to make sure that the things they do have a positive outcome and this requires thinking before acting and acting according to a mixture of reason and feeling, not feeling alone.
Critical thinking, per se, probably cannot be taught. It can be modeled, to a degree of course. But when it comes to procedures and processes, critical thinking is better for telling us what not to do than what we should do. An acquaintance with the more common logical fallacies won't lead to you acting according to unerring good sense, but it will keep you from repeating the most common mistakes over and over again: at least if you make a mistake, it will be a new one! But in the end, critical thinking tells us more about whether our conclusions emerge logically from our premises or whether we're using the kind of wishful thinking that says, "I'm very pragmatic: since I couldn't afford a Rolls-Royce on my minimum wage income, I settled for a Porsche and saved $200,000. Now I've got enough to make a down payment on a house!"
The reason freedom of speech is so important is that in a world where absolute right answers are relatively scarce, a people has to work to find the right answers for having the kind of country they want to have and living the kinds of lives they want to lead. You can't have perfect order and absolute freedom - the crazies will use their freedom to disrupt order. But you can't have perfect order with no freedom either - the crazies will step outside of the order and lots of people will follow them. So society has to strike a balance, figuring out what it will put up with and in what measure in return for the freedoms and opportunities for growth that are associated versus the restrictions it will put up with in order to maintain order and security. Societies that decide wrongly - Zimbabwe is a strikingly horrifying example these days - pay the price for not finding that balance. Societies that do better - much of Western Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia come to mind - tend to make the money and live the good life. These are, incidentally, the places where open discussion and even downright nasty discussion can take place in the open and where political and financial marketplaces can quickly determine what citizens and consumers will accept as right for them in the aggregate, if not locating the Platonic essence of correctness.
Aristotle said that the good is that at which all things aim. He meant to say that we all mean to do well, unless we are mad, and that in the long run we'll find our way to virtue and intelligent action by the observation of what reasonable and reasonably well off people tend towards. It's sort of circular - something is good because it's aimed at, and it's aimed at because it's good. But this hit or miss notion does well at explaining how self-causing moralities and notions of justice wind up creating stable and profitable societies that march along across the centuries, adjusting here and there but evolving more than changing outright. Freedom of speech and the exercise of critical faculties in deciding what to do with the content of that free speech have tended to create societies that may not be the best by some objective criteria, but that are the ones that everyone seems to want to emigrate to, and so we're back to the good as that at which all things aim.
The above may seem like an idle meditation. In fact, it is but prelude.
The good news is that what follows is much shorter!
What Steve has to say about critical thinking and freedom of speech dovetails nicely with something closer to our focus here: The Best Way to Learn a Foreign Language. To put it simply, there is none. While we tend all of us to grow up in societies and learn languages according to a combination of assimilation and instruction, we are all different. Our backgrounds are different, our experiences in the world are different, the wiring of our brains varies.
It is safe to say that if someone came up with "the food method" - you eat tuna fish to learn German, roast beef to learn French and rice to learn Russian, and that's all you need to do - you could call that person crazy and say that he had no business being a language teacher. Our critical faculties will tell us that we're unlikely to find a mechanism whereby the consumption of certain foods would alter our environment or perception of it sufficiently to cause a new language to come into our brains. But when it comes to Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, The Linguist and those old Dover Essential Grammar of... books, it's plausible to see them as language learning tools. That given, some will want to say, "Yeah, but which one's the best?" That depends on who you are and how you learn.
A certain company whose name escapes me boasts that more people have learned with that company's products than any other. Given the number of monolinguals in the United States, I'd be keeping my mouth shut or somebody's going to notice that twice as many people bought the CDs as speak Spanish and wonder what happened! At any rate, it's great that we haven't found the best way of learning languages, because if we had, all the people it didn't work for would be in trouble. Instead, there's a marketplace of ideas about learning and marketplaces to purchase implementations of those ideas. So have a look around, see what feels right for you and move on if something isn't working for you. If
nothing works for you, you will need to examine your commitment to learning and the dedication with which you study. But the odds are that if you're learning one of the more common languages, the right book or CD set to get you started is sitting in a bookstore or online retailer just waiting for you to discover it. Happy searching. And remember, even if it says you'll learn everything you need to know in ten days, it still might have some good stuff and be worth looking at, even if the publisher's marketing department needs a good scolding.
Personal Update Tired of shirking my Breton studies with Assimil, I've deliberately put them on the back burner for the moment. I'm rereading a lesson every two or three days or doing the scriptorium variation I mentioned the other day. In the meantime, I've gotten a hold of a good Breton dictionary and
Turn of the Ermine - an anthology of Breton literature - and have been reading, translating and listening to music. I'll come back to the Assimil in a week or two when I get tired of looking things up and decide it's time to expand my knowledge a little more systematically again.
