English · Chapter 26
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Critical Thinking is a Language Development unit of the Grade 12 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is the disciplined habit of examining ideas, evidence and, above all, oneself before accepting a claim as true. The unit trains reading comprehension through a reflective text, builds a vocabulary of reasoning and judgement, sharpens grammar through sentence transformation, and asks students to speak and write about thinking clearly. Because NEB questions on this unit reward students who can explain an argument in their own words rather than repeat it, the notes below focus on the ideas of the reading, the words that carry those ideas, and the kind of writing the examiner expects.
The reading text of this unit is "Know Thyself". Its starting point is the ancient Greek maxim inscribed at the temple of Delphi, which asks a person to know himself or herself before anything else. The text treats this instruction as the foundation of wisdom: a person who does not understand his own mind, motives and limitations cannot judge the world fairly, because every judgement passes through the self that makes it.
The central argument is that self-knowledge is both the most important and the most neglected kind of knowledge. People spend their lives learning about the outside world, about science, history and other people, yet they rarely turn the same attention inward. It is far easier to notice the faults of a neighbour than to notice our own. We flatter ourselves, we excuse our failures, and we build comfortable stories about why we acted as we did. The text calls this self-deception the great obstacle to knowing oneself, and it shows that a person can be highly educated and still be a stranger to his own character.
The text also suggests why self-knowledge is so difficult. The mind that examines is the same mind that is being examined, so there is no neutral position from which to look. Feelings such as pride, fear and desire colour what we are willing to see. Habit hides our real motives under respectable names. Honest self-examination therefore demands courage: the willingness to admit an unpleasant truth about oneself and to change rather than to defend.
From this the text draws its practical lesson. Knowing oneself means observing one's own reactions, questioning one's assumptions, testing one's opinions against evidence, and listening to what others see in us. It means separating what we truly believe from what we have merely absorbed from family, society or fashion. A person who does this becomes a better thinker in every field, because critical thinking about the world begins with critical thinking about the thinker. Wisdom, in the text's view, is not the accumulation of facts but the clear and honest understanding of one's own nature and of how that nature shapes one's view of everything else.
For the exam, the main ideas can be summarised in four points: the maxim "know thyself" as the root of wisdom; self-knowledge as the most neglected form of knowledge; self-deception, pride and habit as the obstacles; and honest, evidence based self-examination as the way to overcome them.