Can I teach you to suck eggs
Critical engagement is a vital part of academic learning, something taught to all undergraduates as the wend their way through university. In pop culture it is bandied around as a reason why people fall for memes and factually incorrect content, yet in reality even those trained to critically engage rarely do so in an even manner. Critical thinking in not simply an exercise in challenging sources for the sake of it, it is about analysing and engaging with sources to synthesize knowledge, evaluating it, and then constructing a world view that makes sense based on the evidence provided. If the only evidence you have available means you synthesize a skewed world view then all the critical engagement in the world will not produce a better coherent understanding. This is the trap that many people who clamour for critical engagement fall into: it is not the lack of critical engagement, it is the lack of access or unwillingness to access evidence to shift that understanding.
I see this in my own thinking regularly. I am online denizen, have been since I first connected back in 1993. My thumbs are forever scrolling, my waking hours spent absorbing content and perspectives far from my own. I would like to think I can critically engage with an idea, especially ideas that are knotty and complex, yet in reality often I am only absorbing the content that I have available to me without me actively searching…
