Critical Thinking for Homeland Security
The capacity of a government to protect its citizens pivots on the ability of its leaders and high-placed specialists to think critically. Few times in history point so clearly to this principle than the 9/11 disaster. In 1941, the same year that the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred, Edward M. Glaser published a book titled, An Experiment in the Development of Critical Thinking. Glaser's practice of psychiatry was remarkable in that he dispensed with the Freudian deep dive into past events, pushing his patients to deal with problem solving in the present -- a critical thinking practice he called reality therapy. Many of Glaser's tenets were adopted by other disciplines because of their universal utility and association with positive results. Glaser defined critical thinking as, "A persistent effort to examine any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the evidence that supports or refutes it and the further conclusions to which it tends." The gem in this quotation is: "the further conclusions to which it tends." This is the nexus at which facts, intuition, and imagination meet -- and sometimes collide.
A Failure of Imagination
In the final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the commission asserted that the 9/11 attacks occurred because the measures taken by the U.S. government in the period from 1998 to 2001 "were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management" ("National Commission," 2004, p. 9). Of these, imagination was the key variable that prevented the U.S. government agencies and the military from perceiving that the threat posed by al Qaeda in 2001 was not cut from the same cloth as the usual terrorist threat that had plagued the United States for literally decades. Given the information available to the government and the military at the time of the 9/11 attacks, it is fair to say that it would not even have been a stretch of the imagination, if you will, to perceive the extent to which al Qaeda radicalism had progressed. Prevailing thought at the time was insufficient to imagine "the new brand of terrorism[as] posing a threat beyond anything yet experienced" ("National Commission," 2004, p. 9).
The Critical Thinking Frame Juxtaposed
The Paul-Elder model of critical thinking model applies universal intellectual standards to the elements of thought. These...
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