Oprah, Google And The Quest For Self | The Odyssey Online
Start writing a post
Politics and Activism

Oprah, Google And The Quest For Self

Critical thinking skills only work when we understand what it means to "think critically."

29
Oprah, Google And The Quest For Self
Critical Thinkers

Sometimes I feel as if our generation that of the “millennial” college student is obsessed with having answers. And thanks to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and iMessaging we actually have answers at our fingers tips nearly twenty-four hours of the day, seven days a week.

If we don’t know what a word means we can look it up. If we forget when our meeting is we can ask a friend. If we need to find out how the symptoms of a planter’s wart present, we can find that too.

Informational data is readily available to us, and we’ve become programmed on asking questions and finding answers – and I would argue that we’ve become so inclined to ask questions and find answers that we speak too much.

We surround ourselves with so much noise that we’re actually inhibiting our capacity to think critically, and summarily, to know ourselves.

It struck me during the first week of classes how many of my professors provided a detailed description of the role of “critical thinking.” This is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, bumped, set, and spiked, bumped, set, and spiked, continuously volleying within our inner circle of classrooms and conversations that I fear we’ve become numb to what “critical thinking” actually entails.

I couldn’t define it. I couldn’t do a definition of “critical thinking” any justice; and I think part of the reason for this is because we’ve become trained to think and see the world “uncritically.”

Can you define critical thinking? Try it.


What did you come up with?

My understanding of it – after some very useful theorizing from professors of religious studies, African/African-American studies, and Spanish is this: a level of thought that requires the thinker, the interpreter (you!) to stop; analyze the situation, think about how other threads are connecting to the problem, project, or issue at hand, and see how these threads intertwine and knot together to form the subject of study.

What struck me the most about this re-conceptualization is the need to stop. So often, at least from my experience, we are taught to answer rapidly. We need to respond – we must fill the awkward silence of the seminar space.

We need to answer, we need to have a right answer, and we need to have it now.

This is entirely rushed, immature, and frankly, uncritical. Unfortunately pedagogy valorizes ends over efficiency. From my own experience, this looks like doing the homework to get it done, to get the checkmark, without actually understanding the processes at hand. This looks like “skimming” the reading in order to say I’ve read it without actually diving into the material in depth, and asking the most important question of the text: “So what?”

This was made real to me as I was working on a farm over the summer with my foreman Domingo. We were power-washing the walls of a farmhouse, well, Domingo was power washing, and I was watching. (To be fair it was my third day on the job.)

Domingo was meticulous. He put effort, enthusiasm, and tact into the art of hosing the green mold off of the white siding. He could have easily sprayed the water, maneuvering the house like Oprah Winfrey showering free books to her talk show audience, but he was patient: the water was focalized on a certain point until it was clean, until it was immaculately white.

Don’t forgo quality for the sake of satisfying your own need for an “answer” – understood loosely as approval, a good grade, and especially, a job.

It is OK not to know what you’re going to do with the rest of your life. Do not sell yourself out for something that may not be the answer to the ultimate question, which I hope, we are all striving to answer: Who am I?

This is one question we cannot Google, and we cannot crowd source (entirely) for. The answer starts within, requiring a critical, self-reflective lens.

Report this Content
This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
Gilmore Girls
Hypable

In honor of Mother’s Day, I have been thinking of all the things my mom does for my family and me. Although I couldn’t write nearly all of them, here are a few things that moms do for us.

They find that shirt that’s right in front of you, but just you can’t seem to find.

Keep Reading...Show less
Relationships

10 Reasons To Thank Your Best Friend

Take the time to thank that one friend in your life you will never let go of.

5584
Thank You on wooden blocks

1. Thank you for being the one I can always count on to be honest.

A true friend will tell you if the shirt is ugly, or at least ask to borrow it and "accidentally" burn it.

2. Thank you for accepting me for who I am.

A best friend will love you regardless of the stale french fries you left on the floor of your car, or when you had lice in 8th grade and no one wanted to talk to you.

Keep Reading...Show less
sick student
StableDiffusion

Everybody gets sick once in a while, but getting sick while in college is the absolute worst. You're away from home and your mom who can take care of you and all you really want to do is just be in your own bed. You feel like you will have never-ending classwork to catch up on if you miss class, so you end up going sick and then it just takes longer to get better. Being sick in college is really tough and definitely not a fun experience. Here are the 15 stages that everyone ends up going through when they are sick at college.

Keep Reading...Show less
kid
Janko Ferlic
Do as I say, not as I do.

Your eyes widen in horror as you stare at your phone. Beads of sweat begin to saturate your palm as your fingers tremble in fear. The illuminated screen reads, "Missed Call: Mom."

Growing up with strict parents, you learn that a few things go unsaid. Manners are everything. Never talk back. Do as you're told without question. Most importantly, you develop a system and catch on to these quirks that strict parents have so that you can play their game and do what you want.

Keep Reading...Show less
friends
tv.com

"Friends" maybe didn’t have everything right or realistic all the time, but they did have enough episodes to create countless reaction GIFs and enough awesomeness to create, well, the legacy they did. Something else that is timeless, a little rough, but memorable? Living away from the comforts of home. Whether you have an apartment, a dorm, your first house, or some sort of residence that is not the house you grew up in, I’m sure you can relate to most of these!

Keep Reading...Show less

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Facebook Comments