Field Notes: Thoughts on Critical Thinking
Yes, I scrolled through this clearly-clickbaity Instagram carousel and read the corresponding article.
Yale-NUS opened two years after I enrolled at the National University of Singapore. It offered a number of courses that NUS students were not given permission to take but Yale-NUS students could take NUS courses. While I was there, NUS students were not allowed in the Yale-NUS library while Yale-NUS students could come to borrow NUS library resources. Yale-NUS was effectively a closed campus even to the wider NUS community.
Yale-NUS closes this year with its final graduating cohort. I will never be pleased with how they announced their closure to students and faculty. With that being said, this assumption that critical thinking education leaves with Yale-NUS is deeply problematic.
Let’s look at the original question asked at the Singapore Perspectives 2025 forum instead of this headline Mothership thinks is journalism.
"A vibrant state clearly requires people who can think critically and pragmatically.
But are we seriously promoting this when our media avoids discussing many controversial issues and more importantly when initiatives like the Yale-NUS partnership was abandoned which was specifically aimed at promoting critical thinking?"
There’s a few parts to this question. The first concerns media and how ‘controversial issues’ are not discussed. The second, how Yale-NUS designed to promote critical thinking specifically and how its closure ( coupled with the media point) limits Singapore to be a ‘vibrant state’ with ‘people who can think critically and pragmatically’.
I am rephrasing the question this way because I think it is either to see some assumptions made by the participant and some follow-up questions I have for them. E.g. what are these controversial issues that are specific to Singapore? Which media have you seen that limits discussion on these topics? If Yale-NUS was developed to teach critical thinking specifically, then are there lessons we have learnt to implement in NUS and other educational institutions? How can we create Singapore to be a vibrant state without an institution like Yale-NUS? Are there not currently other initiatives around Singapore that promote critical thinking?
I am very peeved by the very headline and assumptions made there too. Is it to say that because Yale-NUS promotes critical thinking, it is a superior university? What are the implications of assuming the brand of critical thinking taught at Yale-NUS is better than or should be more widely adopted than the critical thinking promoted in other educational institutions? Can we assume that by virtue of being a Yale-NUS student, you are a critical thinker? What if there are individuals who are bad at it?
At the very core of both questions, headline or actual question, is: what is critical thinking and how is it implemented in the Singapore context?
In the second paragraph, I detailed my observations about Yale-NUS while I was a student on the same campus. I did this to provide more context into how Yale-NUS ran its operations and had exclusionary practices that were systematic, top-down and widely accepted by the larger student population. I personally couldn’t access classes I found interesting and resources I was curious about. I don’t write this out of spite; I am detailing it to demonstrate how resources to promote critical thinking were also withheld from the larger NUS population while Yale-NUS was around. What is the point of an intuition that promotes critical thinking to a subset of the population when we want a ‘vibrant state clearly requires people who can think critically and pragmatically’ (my emphasis).
While the loss of an ala matta is sad, I implore my peers to consider the implications of believing that Yale-NUS was a beacon of critical thinking. You are not the only stakeholders in building a vibrant, politically engaged and critically minded society at home.
This week’s curiosity: