I have for long believed Immanuel Kant's famous statement that "criticism is the most important building tool devised by the human mind" to be the cornerstone of a healthy and dynamic educational/cultural environment. The analogy of the German philosopher's aphorism in eastern literature is Omar Ibn el Khattab's statement, "Blessed is he who shows us our defects", by which he calls on God to bless those who open our eyes to our defects through the medium of criticism.

    After I had embraced the notion that a cultural climate which promotes critical faculties and celebrates critical minds is a prerequisite for a society's development and progress, I had the opportunity to work for twenty years in one of the ten largest economic corporations in the world. The experience allowed me to see this notion put into practice every day. With a history going back over a century, the corporation I worked for had its own internal culture, and it never ceased to amaze me that every single meeting, discussion and seminar I participated in during the twenty years of my tenure embodied the axiom that criticism is the most important building tool devised by man. It did not occur to anyone to hold back from criticizing ideas, plans, programmes and projects, not only before, but during and even after their execution, in order to minimize the negative and maximize the positive aspects of performance in future. Nor was the right to criticize vested exclusively in the upper echelons of the organizational structure; it was a right available to and actively exercised by every thinking person in the firm. And it is from the collective efforts of critical minds that success and distinction are achieved.

    For criticism to become an effective mechanism deployed in a constant quest for excellence by pinpointing whatever is negative as a prerequisite for minimizing it in future and identifying the positive aspects of any idea, process or performance with a view to maximizing them, it must operate in a general climate in which every member of society is familiar with the notion of objective, and hence constructive, criticism. It is a type of criticism which differs in spirit, motivations and aims from the subjective criticism found in some cultures, where criticism is often used as a weapon of attack, revenge, and defamation to further personal agendas or settle old scores. The blame for this aberration lies squarely on the shoulders of a general cultural and educational climate which fails to develop the critical faculty in young minds or to promote the notion that criticism should be used as a rational, objective tool to serve the general interest and not private interests.

    It is not surprising that societies governed by a general cultural climate in which pluralism is accepted and respected should be better equipped to use objective criticism as a means of optimizing all aspects of life than societies which do not tolerate any dissenting opinion or any departure from the norm. In such a monistic climate there is no room for the sort of constructive and objective criticism that targets subjects and not individuals. Nor is it surprising that societies which I have called in a previous chapter societies of systems not individuals should also be better equipped to deploy constructive criticism as a weapon against objective shortcomings.

    There is a strong link between a culture of constructive criticism on the one hand and social mobility on the other. In a society marked by an active process of social mobility which allows for a dynamic process of job rotation in general and among elites in particular, there is a wider scope for planting the seeds of a culture of constructive criticism. The opposite holds true in a closed society where, in the absence of real social mobility, hanging on to the job becomes a do-or-die proposition. This blurs the distinction between what is objective and what is subjective and creates a climate that is inimical to objective criticism.

    I also believe in a strong link between the values of mediocrity referred to in the chapter on Quality on the one hand and the difficulty of propagating a culture of constructive criticism on the other. People of mediocre abilities are aware that they cannot survive in a climate of constructive criticism that would expose their limited skills and talents. And so they ferociously oppose the introduction of a system of performance evaluation based on objective criteria by working actively against the dissemination of a culture of constructive criticism.