Plato, Web2, and the End of Critical Thinking

The Web will be the end of Crit­i­cal Thinking

It is fairly com­mon, par­tic­u­larly among infor­mal groups of edu­ca­tors, to hear some­one  exco­ri­ate the Web, Social Media, and Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy in gen­eral. “Our kids don’t think any­more, they just click.” The argu­ment is that Social Media and text mes­sag­ing are erod­ing, if not destroy­ing, the abil­ity of young peo­ple to write coher­ent sen­tences. In “my day” if you wanted to learn some­thing, you had to pick up a book, roll up your sleeves, and con­cen­trate. Nowa­days, you just Google it or, if you go in for heavy intel­lec­tual lift­ing, you can take five min­utes and read about it in Wikipedia.

[When I started UC Berke­ley, an under­grad­u­ate had to have a ded­i­ca­tion and com­mit­ment to learn­ing. In order to access “infor­ma­tion,” it was nec­es­sary to enter the “tem­ple of knowl­edge” (the Library), go to the mas­sive ranks of card cat­a­logues, and start thumb­ing. When three likely sources were found, cards would be filled out and handed to the keeper of the books. Elves would scurry through the stacks retriev­ing the requested tomes. As it hap­pened, usu­ally only one of the three would be of any use and the process began again. –Today, I can find more infor­ma­tion in five min­utes than I could in a week in 1967.]

What does this all have to do with Plato? Two-and-a-half mil­len­nia ago, Plato also lived in a time of chang­ing tech­nolo­gies. Plato was lit­er­ate, just as most edu­ca­tors use email, Google, and to a cer­tain extent, social media. Like other edu­ca­tors, Plato was gen­er­ally con­ser­v­a­tive though, and skep­ti­cal of change. One of these changes was the rapid spread of writ­ten lan­guage. Plato felt that writ­ing would, in essence, destroy crit­i­cal think­ing by mak­ing people’s minds lazy. Why remem­ber when all you have to do is open a scroll?

Does any of this sound famil­iar? This is what Plato said about the loss of essen­tial skills result­ing from the adop­tion of new technologies:

“[Writ­ing] will intro­duce for­get­ful­ness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not prac­tice using their mem­ory because they will put their trust in writ­ing, which is exter­nal and depends on signs that belong to oth­ers, instead of try­ing to remem­ber from the inside, com­pletely on their own. You have not dis­cov­ered a potion for remem­ber­ing, but for remind­ing; you pro­vide your stu­dents with the appear­ance of wis­dom, not with its real­ity. Your inven­tion will enable them to hear many things with­out being prop­erly taught, and they will imag­ine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know noth­ing. And they will be dif­fi­cult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Phae­drus 275a-b)

Plato was also pre­scient about content-filtering. There are some things and ideas that should not be shared indiscriminately.

“You know, Phae­drus, writ­ing shares a strange fea­ture with paint­ing. The off­springs of paint­ing stand there as if they are alive, but if any­one asks them any­thing, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of writ­ten words. You’d think they were speak­ing as if they had some under­stand­ing, but if you ques­tion any­thing that has been said because you want to learn more, it con­tin­ues to sig­nify just that very same hing for­ever. When it has once been writ­ten down, every dis­course roams about every­where, reach­ing indis­crim­i­nately those with under­stand­ing no less than those who have no busi­ness with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s sup­port; alone, it can nei­ther defend itself nor come to its own sup­port.” (Phae­drus 275d-e)

There are some ideas that not just any­one should be able to access.

Change is dan­ger­ous. It threat­ens to sweep away things that we have always believed. It fright­ens us because we feel that we don’t under­stand it and can’t con­trol it. Funny thing is: it’s always hap­pened and we’ve always man­aged to use chang­ing ideas and chang­ing ways of doing things to our advantage.

You could go to the Library and see if they can find a copy or…

you can read the full text of Phae­drus here. You can even down­load an audio ver­sion for your iPod/iPhone/iPad.