Imagination Land & Appropriate Empathy (Comprehension: Part I)

When looking past fundamental academic skills like literacy and numeracy, the only real academic skill students should achieve is the ability to critically think. When we critically think, we prevent atrocities (genocide, enslavement, dictatorships, etc.) and maintain human rights. More crucially to us, critical thinking allows our students to retain freedom and autonomy.

Let’s start with an example. When did the United States of America become an independent nation? Well, one might argue that occurred on July 4th, 1776, the day the Declaration of Independence was adopted by Congress. Another person might almost agree, but claim independence was actually gained when the Declaration of Independence was signed – August 2nd, 1776 – not when it was adopted. Another might argue independence was gained on October 7th, 1777, when the Continental Army defeated the British at the Battle of Saratoga and turned the tide of the revolution. Yet another critical thinker might argue the United States of America became an independent nation when Cornwallis surrendered at the Battle of Yorktown on October 17th, 1781 (the last major battle of the war). Yet another critical thinker, completely up in arms about what has been suggested as the date of America’s independence so far, might state that independence was achieved when the Treaty of Paris, which formally recognized the United States as an independent nation from Great Britain, was signed on September 3rd, 1783. Unsatisfied, another critical thinker might suggest that America became an independent nation when it signed its Constitution on September 17th, 1787, another that it became independent when the Constitution was actually ratified in 1788, another when the Constitution was implemented in 1789, and of course one critical thinker that claims the United States still isn’t an independent nation at all. So who’s right? When did America become an independent nation? With all those options, who the fuck knows? But critical thinking – critical analysis of the ideas presented – can help us weed out the bullshit arguments from the ones that have credibility. In an age where rights and freedoms are under attack, where authoritarianism is on the rise, gaslighting is commonplace, and digital misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda run rampant, it is vital that we teach our students how to sift through the bullshit flowing unencumbered in the world. Critical thinking and education are our main tools to counteract injustice (real inequities that lead to real victims). 

The world is a better place when it is filled with critical thinkers. People that critically think are better prepared to make informed decisions on morality and the direction of society. When we learn to critically think, we genuinely gain the capacity to stop atrocities in the world. A society or electorate that can critically think about the ideas or information presented to it can intelligently decide what are the genuinely beneficial or moral leaders, laws, policies, and so on. Critical thinkers don’t vote for dictators, and they also aren’t persuaded by arguments that allow for police brutality, torture, slavery, or sterilizing an entire population of people. When people critically think, they can more easily detect propaganda, false arguments, ill-conceived beliefs, and lies. But why? For the simple reason that critical thinking develops the imagination.

When we critically think, we analyze various types of evidence, arguments, and perspectives (including referencing our own catalog of experiences and worldviews) to come to our most well-reasoned, logical conclusion. I can never know what it’s like to be anyone else, and I can never fully understand experiences I haven’t had. But critical thinking allows me to imagine what it might be like to be a specific person (or in a specific group of people). Critical thinking allows me to imagine how a specific experience might feel. Put together, I gain the ability to imagine what a specific person or group might feel given a particular action. Through that imagination, one human can attempt to empathize with another.

The ability to imagine and to empathize with others is crucially important to critical thinking and critical decision making because we can’t teach emotions. We can’t teach a feeling. We can teach the concept of death and ways people react to it, but we cannot teach a person what that loss feels like. For one, the deaths of different people have different emotional consequences on us. That is to say, the death of one’s loving, caring mother might affect them differently than the loss of a famous athlete they admired as a child. In other words, just as the death of the individual is unique, so too are the possible reactions a living person might have to it. Furthermore, people, groups, cultures, and societies have different traditions to celebrate or mourn the loss of human life: one culture might have a solemn burial with religious prayer, another might keep the bones of the deceased to dance with them in the future, another might turn ashes from cremation into wearable beads, and yet another might engage in geronticide. It is thus not possible to genuinely understand loss or the feeling one has from it until it strikes one personally. Going even further, what if the deceased was an international maniacal asshole responsible for the deaths of hundreds-of-thousands of innocents? Might some people, in that experience of death, even feel joy? Happiness? Relief? Thankful? Might they laugh, smile, celebrate, or cheer? It is because we cannot be anyone else and we cannot fully understand events we have not experienced that the development of critical thinking is necessary. It allows us to imagine what someone else is feeling given a certain event. It allows us to empathize in an appropriate way.