Report from Dan Beaton on teaching Critical Thinking to students in Jaipur, India

With many schools closed and global travel heavily restricted during the covid crisis, Humanist Global Charity have faced limited opportunities to deliver critical thinking classes in 2020-2021. We have, however, made use of online teaching. We have also been working on creating resources for other educators to access.

In October 2020, critical thinking sessions commenced via zoom with students at the Neerja Modi School in Jaipur, India (a school keen to incorporate a module on critical thinking into their IB program).

Our CT teacher Dan Beaton delivered 8 sessions to 3 separate groups of students, with a total of approximately 45 students attending the online course until its completion in June 2021.

The sessions focused on beliefs and their justifications; evidence, and superstitions; identifying fallacies and psychological biases, and modern misinformation.

During the session on superstitions, students noted common features of folk beliefs around the worlds and explored the origins of these beliefs, notably in tradition and authority. Students were also able to see the role that confirmation bias, the placebo effect and the Barnum effect have in sustaining such superstitions once they are inculcated. A range of local superstitions were identified from the relatively harmless injunctions such as ‘do not cut nails after sunset’ to dangerous practices such as the tradition of baby tossing. Many such traditions and beliefs were seen as most common in the student’s grandparent’s generation and as such ‘on their way out’.

Nonetheless beliefs concerning caste were viewed as more incorrigible, as were beliefs like the sanctity of the cow as embedded within wider religious traditions.

In another lesson students worked on identify sources of misinformation in the media and developing their ability to identifying fake news, viral texts, and bad science reporting. Much of our discussion focused on conspiracy theories surrounding covid-19 and vaccinations. One group decided to focus their group work on a how the media in India still normalises child marriage.

A testimonial by one of the students at Neerja Modi School called Prannat claimed,

“The classes were great! Everything was explained explicitly, and the slides were concise. I thoroughly enjoyed the sessions and my favorite topics were fallacies, mental errors and biases, and justifying beliefs. I came across various ways in which a belief can be justified and how to critically analyse and then come to a conclusion.”