TH!NK, Now More than Ever
Marcello Oreste Fiocco is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. A metaphysician and epistemologist, he is the author of a number of papers in leading journals and of Time and the World: Every Thing and Then Some (Oxford University Press, 2024).
I founded TH!NK in the spring of 2015, within a couple weeks of the birth of my first son. (There’s a visual pun in that name. Replacing the “I” with an exclamation point not only exhorts us to use our minds, but to be different. If “!” represents a person, then that person is standing on their head!) There are now literally thousands of local students who have participated in the program.
With TH!NK, I take graduate students into local elementary schools to introduce early adolescents, usually 5th graders, to philosophical thought and discourse. Over the 4-week course, whose curriculum is different for each instructor, we focus, in small groups, on different texts—a poem, a fable, a newspaper article, etc.—to explore critically its content. We demonstrate that philosophy is an activity, critical thinking, rather than a subject matter devoted to the esoteric thought of long-dead sages.
I started TH!NK because philosophy construed as an activity is not an indulgence, but the most transferable skill. Once we learn to think incisively by thinking critically, we can do so with any subject in every situation. As a result, we can gain insight into whatever might interest us, or into any obstacle blocking our path. Philosophy, in this sense, is crucial to living a rich and fulfilling life – and a society of critical thinkers will benefit each member.
Children are naturally philosophers, inquisitive and probing; their inquiry is directed at understanding rather than acquiring mere knowledge. At some point, however, kids start looking for the right answer instead of the next question. TH!NK is meant to reach students when they are still impressionable so that they might sustain, perhaps for a lifetime, a philosophical bent.
In TH!NK, we try to instill the value of thinking critically so that it might someday become second nature. We attempt to do so by demonstrating the value of questions, illustrating the difference between a question that can be answered by simple observation (What time is it? Is the door open?) and one that requires a different sort of engagement with the world (What is time? Why did she leave the door open when she left?).
We encourage students to change perspectives. To develop this ability, we might read a story told from one point of view and ask students to retell it from a different one. Changing perspectives gets one outside of oneself, fostering empathy and fluidity in thought. A reaction that is inscrutable from one position might seem wholly natural from a different one. A problem that seems insoluble from one view, might be easily resolved from another.
We show students that each context requires assumptions. We try to make them aware of what they are presuming in a given situation to make that situation manageable. Relatedly, assumptions have commitments and consequences that extend to other situations. We want students to be aware of these, too. We stress the importance of reason and reasons and try to help students see why they believe what they do. We want them to locate the box they are sometimes urged to think outside of. We want them not only to find this box, but also to be able to discern its joints, disassemble it, and to consider whether to put it back together or to exchange it for a different construction.
Perhaps our most important goal with TH!NK is to get students confused. I want them to feel the acute discomfort of having a task that they really want to accomplish yet are unable to—and have no idea how to proceed. I want them to feel this intellectual confusion, so I can suggest that although the confusion feels horrible, it is actually something good, not an indication that something has gone wrong. It is neither a sign of stupidity nor an experience to be avoided. Rather, it indicates that they are pressing against a boundary. Unless they learn how to push through that boundary—using some of the tools of critical thinking that we provide—they will never develop intellectually. They will resort to old ideas and modes of thinking that cannot accomplish what they need them to. I am always pleased when, in the process of considering some question or new concept, a student exclaims with excited frustration, “My brain hurts!”
I started TH!NK because I thought critical thinking was important and wanted all young people to have the chance for it to enhance their lives the way it has mine. I could not have foreseen the frightening threats to critical thinking present today. Generative AI might be valuable in certain fields or to experts who have already mastered vital skills, yet it is destructive to philosophy as critical thinking and to the humanities more generally. Most insidiously, AI provides an easy way to avoid encountering intellectual confusion by offering an always-available escape route. But that route leads nowhere. Generative AI purports to “think” for us, offering elaborations and justifications that forestall opportunities to change our perspectives and scrutinize our commitments. Because of the infiltration of AI into our educational system, I now do TH!NK with urgency.
This winter I was able to do TH!NK with the 5th graders at my son’s school, the boy who was just born when I began the program. From the outset, I hoped that one day I would be able to bring TH!NK to his classroom. I thought the program would only augment the critical thinking skills that he and his peers would be developing—I did not know that TH!NK might be helpful in preserving them at all.
