The Evasion of Critical Thinking in Communism

Clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, and logic are regarded as universal intellectual standards of critical thinking, which must be applied each time we evaluate a situation or problem. However, critical thinking encompasses more than mere logical reasoning, extending into the fields of psychology and sociology. Consequently, possessing the ability to employ critical thinking entails: rejecting societal opinions, formulating one’s own perspective, understanding arguments for and against, making autonomous decisions regarding what is considered true or false, acceptable or unacceptable, desirable or undesirable. During the communist period, the role and status of social-humanities disciplines within the school curriculum were consistently diminished, and the content of the remaining disciplines was distorted. In this context, the university curriculum was modified in 1948: several departments deemed “useless” were abolished, and political education was accorded increased importance. Later, in the 1970s, higher education underwent a process of technicization, primarily reducing non-technical specializations. These changes were compounded by the purging of faculty members deemed undesirable, a process begun as early as 1944, the loss of university autonomy in 1946, an increase in political instruction hours, and the gradual reduction of student enrollment in social-humanities fields. Moreover, the suppression of individuality, restrictions on access to information, Communist censorship, the inability to critique ideas, and the gradual closure of Romania rendered the development of critical thinking impossible. The negative consequences of its absence persist today, with its benefits neither fully realized nor widely acknowledged.