I was going to introduce this topic by introducing the idea of teaching critical thinking skills at various childhood, adolescent and young adult developmental milestones, but my inner conspiracy theorist just chimed in and said to me “they don’t teach that in public schools because they don’t need you to learn it to be able to function in society. Can’t have people questioning authority constantly, after all. That could cause the machine to seize up”
Fairly soon, but not so soon that the child begins to question the stability of every foundation. You need to let them get to a point where they first have their basic concepts and everything formed and they can trust things they are told. Then once the mental concrete is firm, you can begin introducing critical skepticism.
“How to think” should definitely be taught before “What to think”.
We’ve talked about this in other threads.
My take is that parents should introduce the subject in simple form before school age, then critical thinking should be reinforced up through grammar school, high school and college, with at least one mandatory course along the way.
Lack of critical thinking capacity takes a big toll on society.
I want to say that the first formal training in critical thinking I experienced was an undergrad philosophy course that was taught by a prof who relied entirely on using the Socratic method. Just seems like that could have been taught at a younger age. At least from my perspective.
I probably should have checked first to see if this ground had already been covered before starting a new thread. Sorry.
When I was little and went to my father and asked him a question, and it was a question that he thought I could myself answer if I just thought about it, he would ask me questions in return. They were designed to help me in a step by step fashion find the answer to my own question. That was definitely teaching critical thinking skills.
My take, with my own kid, is as soon as humanly possible. He’s facing challenges to critical thinking I never could have dreamed of - rampant misinformation online, AI slop and the like.
There are foundational concepts though. I don’t want him to mistrust everything. But he is a skeptic by nature and he is already asking about the ways, for example, advertisers are trying to manipulate him. He’s also asked how to know if something is a reliable source of information.
To use an example, he was taught at school that fiction is made up stuff and non-fiction is true.
Me and his Dad were like, “Whoa. Not necessarily.”
So we had to have this really nuanced conversation with a 6-year-old and I admit it’s a challenge.
The biggest hurdle we may have to overcome is the desire to instill our own beliefs in him. For example my son is really into math, so as a thought experiment he and I calculated the difference in monthly income between minimum wage and the median wage, and then we subtracted our mortgage payment from it so he could see the difference in how much is left over for other expenses. So he learned that someone making minimum wage couldn’t even afford our mortgage payment, and someone making median wage could afford it but wouldn’t have enough left over for other basic expenses.
I could not resist stuff like, “And this isn’t fair. And some people have to work three jobs and that’s why your Dad and I vote for XYZ policies and also this is why you need an education.” Which is all true but probably not as useful for teaching critical thinking.
The main issue I’m having (besides that) is he resists answering his own questions, so when I ask him “What do you think?” he says, “I don’t know.”
Yet he draws plenty of conclusions independently if you aren’t grilling him about it. And he already has a very well-defined sense of justice.
So I could probably stand to be more hands-off, honestly. Maybe just point him in the right direction and see how he does.
But yeah, from my perspective, these skills can’t come soon enough. I was 18 when I learned to think critically, I don’t think it can wait that long.
A serious question, not a gotcha, but do you mean by parents/guardians? Or by educational systems? Because the latter especially is a front line conflict in the current “culture war”. The latter of which is probably in line with your inner CT in the OP!
In general, the first (education by parents/guardians) should be (IMHO) done, as suggested early and often, as the child learns enough to be able to understand more. But many guardians and parents in fixed belief systems (religious, political, etc.) choose to avoid it, quite possibly going in the opposite direction if anything.
The second option is so incredibly political I think it might need it’s own thread.
But my values say it should be taught on both fronts, because I don’t see any reasonable way to force a parent to teach it (especially when they may not have ever been taught to themselves, or care to!), but find it a critical skill for almost any occupation and civic interaction. Which should enshrine it as a mandatory public educational skill, starting as early as, say, 10-12 years old. Which the sheer amount of easily accessible Conspiracy Theories and Outrage-tertainment misinformation online, more so than ever to be honest.
What makes you think they don’t teach it in public schools? There’s no class called “Critical Thinking” because it’s taught in all classes.
Or at least, we try to. Critical thinking is difficult to teach.
When I was a teacher I saw it as part of my job to challenge kids in ways that demanded critical thinking. And when I say kids, I mean starting in Kindergarten. I would usually do it in a way the kids found funny and entertaining.
Example…
Me: How old are you?
Kid: I’m six.
Me: Really? I was never six. I went directly from five to seven.
Kid: (Thinking… thinking…) That’s impossible!
Multiply by a few and I felt they were started on the right path to critical thinking.
The first Christmas when Santa uses the same wrapping paper as mom and dad.
Some public schools teach it, but mine didn’t really. What I got out of it was what I made out of it (challenging myself beyond what was required) and even then, when I went to an actual university with rigorous academic standards it was quite a shock to my system. I don’t think I really learned to think critically until college.
My son’s public school is probably going to teach critical thinking. It’s known for its academic rigor.
But me? I went to a C grade high school in rural Michigan. I was expected to read textbooks and regurgitate answers, which I did beautifully.
The quality of the education you can get in the US varies dramatically depending on geography. And not that far either - we just moved 20 minutes to the East and it’s a whole different world.
I think my undergraduate education was exceptional for this sort of thing. For example, in one of my philosophy classes (Contemporary Moral Problems), we had to critically evaluate my university’s argument for affirmative action, as it was in the middle of a Supreme Court battle regarding same. Sure most of us had a liberal opinion but you didn’t get a pass for having the “right” perspective. We were graded by how well we constructed our arguments. IIRC my first paper in that class got a C- which was my first C EVER and just about killed me. But I did a rewrite and got an A-.
I am fiercely loyal to that university and all it gave to me. My husband feels the same.
I have made a commitment to myself that my child is going to get a damned good education even if I have to do it myself, he’s going to learn to think critically and he’s going to be an informed voter. I consider those three things necessary to survival. I will support any efforts by the school to equip him in this regard.
It almost doesn’t matter – my (public) school began teaching critical thinking skills at least in middle school, 5th/6th grade, but probably earlier as it was a fairly progressive district education-wise. Most of my peers just seemed to be incapable of learning, creating a sort of class rift between the “honors/AP kids” and everyone else.
I’m in a teacher education program right now and I can assure you that, like Chronos said, there’s a huge emphasis on teaching critical thinking skills. The only roadblock in a lot of schools is that it’s hard.
An admirable approach, and one that takes a certain amount of skill and patience too.
I’m sure that it’s much harder nowadays to resist the ‘Just Google it’ approach, or (more likely), turning to something like Chat GTP. We’re generally becoming more comfortable with outsourcing the thinking process to an AI.
I assume (perhaps incorrectly) this was directed at my post? If so, I disagree in practice, though it certainly is so in the ideal. I grew up in Las Cruces NM, going to public schools. My parents, having moved from Massachusetts, were really concerned with the quality of such schools, both being educators themselves.
They were largely reassured by the quality of the various “honors” and later AP classes offered, but exactly as @steronz mentioned, it lead to a definite separation between those in such programs and those outside of them. There was a marked difference in quality and engagement between the teachers of the ‘normal’ classes and those of us who were “gifted”.
The assumption became much more clear at each break - minor in elementary (but absolutely there), significant in Junior High, and absolute in High School where it further emphasized college/university preparedness.
Now, I fully grant each school district is different, each school, and each teacher. I’m painting with a wide brush after all. But in my limited life experience outside those programs, the teachers were concentrated on getting the information and/skills across, getting through the required curriculum in time, and making sure everyone who was vaguely awake and aware passing, rather than teaching critical thought. Not that they didn’t want to, or try, but just not having the time or the student interest to do so.
The Honors/AP classes (big shoutout to Professor Alvarez for High School AP History!!!) were huge on the critical thinking elements, and were much more interested in teaching the process of learning or discovery. Even if I wasn’t interested or skilled in some of those areas, I could appreciate how much they cared, and about why they felt we should care.
Like a lot of things, when a metric becomes the measurement… well, they teach to the metric.
-sigh-
Which brings us back to the present - when School Boards are a reflection of the nationwide culture war, they are taking actual action against teachers who go beyond the narrow curriculum, and that leaves out states that have out-and-out embraced a partisan education to forward a religious doctrine and eliminate debate over several national failures, the points of many threads in discussion.
The antithesis of critical thinking as it were.
Critical thinking is the cousin of logic. You can start that with physical puzzles. So… before they can walk.
It was directed at the OP,
And yes, I acknowledge that not all teachers manage to live up to that ideal. But even for that portion of teachers who are “just trying to get through the curriculum”, the curriculum designers were trying to design the curriculum to cover critical thinking, too.
If the school system really were designed, as cynics claim, just to turn children into industrial cogs in society, then we wouldn’t teach literature or history to anyone, nor science or most math to most students. The only reason we teach those is as a vehicle for teaching critical thinking.
I’ve never believed that, FWIW. Not educating people at all would actually be better suited to that goal.
I think it’s a natural response to the fact that non-conforming students tend to have a really hard time.
I did very well following all the rules in school and felt perfectly suited to the environment, but my son is extremely stressed by the classroom environment and is having a hard time functioning much less thriving. I believe it’s those experiences that lead people to conclude school is some kind of drone training program. Because many of them felt like they were being forced into a shape that was not their own.
Our daughter came home in 2nd grade and announced that Santa wasn’t real. When we asked why she said that, she explained that all the books about him in the school library were in the Fiction section.
We didn’t worry much about her developing critical thinking skills after that (plus we had a lot more evidence that hers were fine).