This is a longer post about a thorny topic – one that passes through climate change, psychology, and even a comedian – before arriving at a pedagogical and democratic question that I can summarise as follows:

Do we want young people to think critically and speak their minds, or do we mainly want them to think like us?

A keynote on climate and more

Last weekend I spoke at the ResearchED conference in Cambridge. One of the keynote speakers was Mike Berners-Lee. Besides being the younger brother of the inventor of the World Wide Web, he’s a British researcher, author, and speaker who specialises in measuring carbon footprints and sustainability. He’s the director of Small World Consulting and a professor at Lancaster University, best known for his books How Bad Are Bananas? and There Is No Planet B.

His latest book, A Climate of Truth, argues that global problems such as climate change, inequality and food insecurity can only be addressed through greater honesty. According to him, dishonesty in politics, business, and media is a major obstacle and improving honesty is the single most important step to help society flourish.

In his 40-minute keynote, a lot passed by rather quickly, but one recurring point was the need to foster critical thinking among young people. Who could disagree? Question sources, consider who is speaking, challenge assumptions. All perfectly sound. What was missing, though, was an emphasis on knowledge, the substance that makes critical thinking possible in the first place.

Oops

I’m not qualified to comment on climate science, but I couldn’t help thinking about the importance of knowledge when Berners-Lee made a few psychological slips. He repeated the original model of Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief as fact. That’s problematic for several reasons: we now know the stages aren’t linear, don’t apply to everyone, and were never meant to describe all forms of grief in the first place.

He also mixed up the “left–right brain” idea (ouch) with Kahneman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking. I couldn’t resist mentioning it afterwards, privately, not during the session. On Kübler-Ross, he admitted he didn’t know. Regarding the brain myth, he insisted it had been debunked again, which sent me back to the literature to be sure. I could be wrong, of course, but I haven’t found any recent evidence for that. (If I’ve missed something, please let me know!)

Critical thinking

In a way, that small exchange probably illustrated what critical thinking should look like: questioning claims based on knowledge, and checking again when challenged. So far, so good.

But underneath, there was another assumption that Berners-Lee repeated several times: that if we all learned to think critically, we’d all come to see what’s wrong – and start thinking like him, or like us. That, I think, is the more troubling idea, because disappointment is then inevitable.

It reminded me of how the early theorists of youth culture at the CCCS assumed that young people were, by nature, progressive. We know better now. Young people are just people: some more progressive, some more conservative. And are conservative thinkers automatically wrong?

A pedagogical question

That brings me to the heart of the matter. Do we want to teach young people to think critically, or to think critically within the boundaries we draw? The difference is crucial – and in practice, often paper-thin.

Anyone who teaches knows how strongly our own convictions shape what we do. We choose examples and cases we find meaningful. We react differently to students whose “critical questions” confirm our worldview than to those who challenge it. Yet it’s precisely the latter that may be the actual test of critical thinking.

Moral trait or cognitive skill?

Critical thinking is not a moral virtue but a cognitive skill – embedded in knowledge, context and reasoning. A genuinely critical thinker may reach a conclusion you disagree with. And that has to be okay. In fact, that’s the point.

In that sense, teaching critical thinking is an uncomfortable pedagogical task. It requires us to give students space to explore views we may personally reject; to teach them to argue without steering them toward “the right” conclusion. To care less about what they think, and more about how they think.

Berners-Lee’s call for critical thinking – like many others – probably stems from a well-intentioned hope: that better thinking will naturally lead to “the right” outcomes. But reality is messier. Thinking well doesn’t guarantee agreement; it only makes disagreement more reasonable. And perhaps that’s exactly what we need most today – though that, of course, is my personal opinion, and some critical thinkers may disagree.

A democratic question

I wish I could have discussed this with the late Piet van der Ploeg, because there are clear parallels with debates on citizenship education. Think of someone like David Van Reybrouck, who openly questions whether our democracy can still save the planet. His reasoning makes sense: our political systems are designed for short-term incentives. They reward polarisation and quick wins, while climate policy requires patience, knowledge and cooperation.

Van Reybrouck, I suspect, would find much common ground with Berners-Lee: both believe our societies need more reflection, reason and honesty – and that better thinking will lead to better action. Van Reybrouck looks for solutions in deliberative democracy – citizen assemblies, sortition, dialogue – in the hope that, when properly informed, citizens make wiser decisions than politicians in campaign mode.

The right thing?

I honestly don’t know what Piet would have thought of that. He was certainly not against reason or dialogue. Still, he distrusted conceptions of citizenship that quickly become instrumental: democracy or education used as tools to reach a desired social goal, rather than valued as ends in themselves. In his words, that’s social engineering.

Once we involve citizens or students merely so that they’ll “see the right thing”, we undermine the very autonomy and participation that democracy depends on. Van der Ploeg also reminded us that reasonableness doesn’t arise from dialogue alone, but from knowledge – from well-informed citizens who learn to judge, not just to participate.

Which leads to a complex but essential pedagogical question: can we still teach citizenship and democracy without attaching a desired outcome to them? Can we trust young people or citizens, with freedom, even when they use it differently from what we hope? Perhaps that’s the essence of mature citizenship, and by extension, of a democracy that, however inefficient, still takes its citizens seriously.

Someone else I heard on that trip…

After the conference, I saw what seemed like the complete opposite of Berners-Lee and Van Reybrouck: Ricky Gervais. A recurring theme in his show – apart from life and death – was the importance of freedom of speech. For him too, that freedom isn’t absolute: you may not incite violence or spread defamation. But, as he put it, you must also be free to disagree – even with those who are themselves exercising free speech. And yes, you’re allowed to answer back.

It sounded like comic relief after the conference’s seriousness, but it actually touched the same core. It’s all about trust – in people, in reason, in our ability to weigh words rather than ban them. Freedom of speech, in that sense, isn’t the right to be right, but the right to think. Sometimes out loud, sometimes clumsily, sometimes uncomfortably.

And perhaps that’s the thread connecting critical thinking, citizenship and democracy: they all depend on an uneasy kind of freedom. The freedom to make mistakes, to challenge others, and to remain in disagreement – without anyone being lectured on what the “right” way to think is.

Maybe that’s the hardest lesson of all, for students, citizens, and conference speakers alike:
Freedom is only worth something if it’s allowed to chafe.

Image: https://stockcake.com/i/spotlight-on-stage_534419_1132447