Critical citizenship

THE root cause of our political problems lies in the lack of critical thinking among citizens. There is this sad tendency of people to equate being critical to the act of criticizing, and that it is nurtured not in mobilizing rational thinking but in deploying emotional attachments to political figures and narratives.

Critical thinking can be defined as the process that involves active and skilled conceptualization, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation of information that is gathered from, or generated by systematic processes of inquiry. It entails the analysis of facts, evidence, observations and arguments as the basis for making decisions and choices through the application of rational, skeptical and unbiased analyses. This serves as a guide for the formation of beliefs and for action.