Understanding is necessary for critical thinking —but also for its declared foe of uncritical dogmatic thinking

In the literature about pedagogy, “traditional education” has become the name for the beast that good sensible educators of all persuasions must fight against, and banish from their classrooms; the straw man whose burning will take away our pedagogical malaises. One of the main characteristics of this evil of traditional education has been referred to with expressions like “memoristic learning”, “memorisation”, “mechanical transfer of information”, and others. The proposals that have promised to replace traditional education and to avoid memoristic learning, have come under various guises, such as understanding (Wiske, 1998) and significant learning (Fink, 2003), among many others. In this essay I will refer to all of them, generically, as understanding. In a somewhat different vein, the development of critical persons has also been declared a central task of education. It also has various different manifestations, sometimes very contradictory between them. They include approaches based on informal logic and argumentation theories (Ennis, 1996) —in the case of the critical thinking movement— as well as approaches based on sociological theories from modernist and postmodernist orientations (Giroux, 1997; McLaren, 1994) —in the case of critical pedagogy— among others. Even though the expression “critical thinking” is mostly used in relation to the first of the two types of approaches just mentioned, I will still use it in this paper to refer, generically, to various manifestations of criticality that cover at least critical thinking and critical consciousness. Now, interestingly, the kinds of results that are intended to be achieved when understanding and critical thinking are sought for, seem to sometimes be very similar. But the issue needs a closer look. What is the relation between understanding and critical thinking? ¿Is it that they are both the same? Or is it that critical thinking is simply one of the characteristics of understanding? Or, possibly an understanding is necessary but not sufficient for critical thinking to develop about any topic?