A Meta Curriculum Based upon Critical Thinking

Two great problems besiege educators of the 90's. What can be done about the fragmentation and over-specialization of the traditional disciplines? How can students integrate what they learn for application to lifelong human issues? These questions reflect the dismay of both educators and students as they see how few graduates seem prepared to be the creative problem solvers needed by society now and in the future. Roots of Knowing At Pace University, New York, we have incorporated critical thinking into a program called Roots of Knowing. Our objectives are (i) to offer a framework of universal concepts that unify the disciplines and (ii) to show how these concepts can help people process personal and social events throughout life. Our program can be conceived as a meta curriculum for at least two years of interdisciplinary education and as a blueprint for lifelong education. In constructing the Roots of Knowing (ROK) program, we built upon: (i) critical thinking tools posited in typical texts; (ii) the formulations of general semantics of Korzybski (1958); and (iii) the "epistemics" of J. S. Bois (1978), and integrated them with principles of human development and educational psychology. The ROK program instructs students not only in the usual skills of logic, argument, analysis, synthesis, etc., but also enables them to visualize and utilize five world views, or overall patterns of thinking-feeling-doing, that regularly characterize people's approaches to any subject or social issue. In addition to the five world views (called epistemes), the program's curriculum identifies four universal daily human operations, a hundred concepts that explain the world views, six categories of human issues, plus a pedagogy for communicating the program. Our definition of critical thinking, then, is operational. As students master the ROK program, they become increasingly able to perceive, evaluate, decide, and act upon any subject or issue from five different perspectives. They utilize a wide variety of universal concepts that can structure, relate, and order the event they experience. By transcending the five perspectives, students are better able to make responsible choices as they interact cooperatively with others. Thus, critical thinking, in the ROK framework, is consistent with the goals of education in general and with the current call for a more unified, relevant course structure. How the ROK Program Developed The P.E.D.A. Process In trying to decide what it is that people need to live and grow throughout life, we eschewed the factual content of traditional subject matter and chose instead to ask, "What do people have to do all their lives?" Boiled down, we noted that all people must Perceive, Evaluate, Decide, and Act every day, virtually all the time. We Perceive; i.e. select, note, observe, be aware of what is going on inside and outside of our heads. We must Evaluate what goes on; i.e. make predictions, value judgments, estimates, theories. We must Decide what to do or not to do; i.e. summarize, plan, conclude. Then, we must Act; i.e. move, speak, write, implement, etc. We call these the P.E.D.A. processes. Our students learn they cannot cross a street without observing and evaluating what is going on in the streets and in their heads and then making a decision to act one way or another. They realize that professors go through the same processes in conducting a course, that spouses use all four of the P.E.D.A. skills in conducting their marriages, that the U.N. General Assembly goes through everyday cycles of observing, evaluating, deciding, and acting about world affairs. Therefore, we postulate that the basic units of knowing are the P.E.D.A. processes. Subjects like history, English, math, science, etc., become background resources more than foreground essentials. In fact, we emphasize that people can learn how to P.E.D.A. not only from traditional subjects but also from public media, ordinary conversations, work projects, committee meetings, wars, peace movements, or any event whatever. …