Critical Thinking Education in the American Propaganda Movement. : Focusing on the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

This article discusses the relationship between the propaganda movement and American critical thinking education from the 1930s to 1940s. The following three points are clarified. First, the establishment of the Committee on Public Information by President Wilson during World War I initiated the propaganda study. Like Bernays, the propaganda study was encouraged as a persuasion tool not only in the war but also in the commercial advertisement after World War I. Second, Biddle classified an achievement of maturity from autistic thinking to critical thinking. Autistic thinkinng did not have or persist own idea. And three stages of maturity were the personal, family, and social stages. Furthermore, he insisted on setting up resistance against organized uncritical thought as a method of teaching critical thinking. Third, Jewett examined the teaching possibility about discrimination among articles containing different amounts of propaganda in four Minnesota high schools. The results indicated that the students who were taught under the experimental conditions showed a highly significant superiority over those in the control groups. Overall, the teaching of critical thinking during the 1930s and 1940s was unique in terms of its contents and methods. It was also more original because it was teaching in an almost literal sense of the word "critical", which is to analyze, judge the information, and detect an error on one's own.