Teaching critical thinking could propel societies into a new golden age

Consider the following: 22 per cent of people in the UK and 15 per cent of Egyptians have a university degree. When you throw in the entire Egyptian diaspora, the percentage grows to 19 per cent. In other words, the UK and Egypt are quantitatively nearly equal.

Now pretend that you are 18 and you want to go to a university. Let’s say that I have the ability to send you to university for free in either Egypt or Britain (no top UK universities). Almost everyone in this exercise chooses the UK. Why? If Egypt is comparable in level of college degree attainment, then how is it that it’s not a competitive choice? Egyptians are just as brilliant as UKers, so it’s not an IQ issue.

Pretend for a moment that you are a policy maker in the 20th century from a newly liberated postcolonial state. What are your top education priorities? You desperately need engineers, lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants and managers. You might want – but you don’t need – art historians, political scientists, sociologists and so on. With limited resources, you must design a university system that is great at creating engineers and awful at producing scholars in the humanities and social sciences. It’s a matter of survival.

Mohammed Al Gergawi, the UAE’s Minister of Cabinet Affairs, recently gave a talk in which he said that in 1971 the UAE had 45 Emiratis with college degrees. Forty-five! How do you staff the bureaucracy? The UAE, like most states that emerged in the 20th century, was born in a technocratic famine. In other words, the systematic neglect of the social sciences and humanities was warranted.

But it’s no longer 1919, 1952 or 1971. It’s time for the Global South to step up its game.

To illustrate why this is necessary, I think we should address the usefulness of a world-class university. The most important use has already been addressed. Universities create the talent necessary to run a state. If we superimpose Maslow's hierarchy of needs onto the university-state relationship, then this is the first need – physiological.

Safety is the second need in Maslow’s hierarchy. In this model it translates into “good citizens”. Let’s be honest, over the past 6,500 years, most states have thought it best to have an uncritical, ignorant and brainwashed citizenry. The university was always a dangerous enterprise because it created a population capable of critical thinking that might rebel against too much corruption. By contrast, states that experimented with teaching critical thinking (such as the medieval Islamic states and the Kingdom of Prussia) had incredible results. Name the greatest minds of the past 250 years. An overwhelming majority of them are German or Austrian. Innovation flourishes when your public is unleashed.

The internet upended the value of an ignorant and brainwashed public. Today it is a liability, unless of course your state is a tyranny in a predatory relationship with its own people. What the past 25 years have taught us is that an ignorant population with access to the internet is a disaster. When people who are incapable of discerning fact from fiction, incapable of critical thinking and lack basic information are exposed to rabbit-hole algorithms, they will fall prey to outlandish ideas. This is extremely harmful in an electoral republic, but even the best of monarchies has to take care.

The internet came into the world full of promise. The ability to instantly look up information and instantly communicate with the entire planet could easily have created a new golden age. Instead, we have seen an explosion of nonsensical conspiracy theories, an entrenchment of reactionary ideas and an explosion of xenophobia.

How do you combat this? Philosophy! Critical thinking skills and the ability to discern fact from fiction have become the benign state’s best safeguard against the most outrageous effects of the internet.

Allow me to skip Maslow’s third (love and belonging) and fourth (esteem) needs. The fifth need is self-actualisation. For the university-state relationship, this is an intellectual culture. In order to create innovation, you must either grow your innovators at home or poach them from elsewhere. The US has done both, very successfully. However, talent isn’t enough.

If a university is to become world class, it needs more than high-prestige scholars. It must have an intellectual culture. To create that sort of culture you cannot merely publish articles that almost no one will read. Allow me to invoke Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Emile to illustrate this.

Rousseau tells us that we need to train Emile to become an expert in a field so he will thrive professionally (Maslow’s fourth need). Rousseau also tells us that in educating Emile’s female counterpart, Sophie, we shouldn’t waste any effort giving Sophie a specialisation. Rather we should give her a broad education. This will give her the tools of conversation so that she can attract a potential mate (Maslow’s third need). So, if Emile becomes a pianist, Sophie can play a little piano or if Emile becomes a mathematician, Sophie also knows some trigonometry. Just enough to make her charming without being threatening.

We know how Rousseau’s education scheme will play out. Emile is a fachidiot. He cannot converse outside of his area of specialisation. The sinews of an intellectual culture are created in conversation, so Emile is a cultural dead end. By contrast, because Sophie has been exposed to so many areas of study, she might actually find her calling in life (Maslow’s fifth need) and because she has such a broad education, after she divorces boring Emile, she has a real chance of adapting to the changing job landscape. But the most important piece for our purposes is that she is capable of participating in intellectual culture.

We must educate everyone, regardless of their gender, in a well-rounded education that develops a field or two where they can claim some measure of specialisation, but without cutting them off from other forms of knowledge. It’s not either or – it’s both. By doing this an engineer can talk to sociologists and philosophers, thus creating a thriving intellectual culture.

I haven’t invented anything. All I did above was describe the liberal arts education. In the UK, the humanities and social sciences are taught with same vigour as the sciences and thus create the basis for a thriving intellectual culture. In other words, we need to instil literature, poetry and philosophy (three core parts of nearly every culture in Africa and Asia) into chemists, physicists and biologists, just as much as we do it for the psychologists, historians and writers.

As that culture finds its way out of the university it will both support universities as well as create the basis for an innovative society. Unfortunately for the world, at the time when we need to expand liberal arts education, the rhetoric of “efficiency” is making cuts in places like the US and the UK too. If America continues on this path, it will render its public universities into vocational schools, innovation will drop and conspiracy theories will fill the void. By contrast, if liberal arts education takes hold in Asia and Africa, the power of the intellectual culture will propel those societies into a new golden age of innovation and discovery.