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How to Teach Your Children to Think Critically
Teaching our children how to be effective thinkers should be one of our highest priorities along with teaching them to be ethically and morally solid. The modern world requires that people become more and better thinkers in order to respond to and help shape the information rich world in which we live. I think all parents want their children to be high quality thinkers. . Think about it. Why would you want your children to be able to think at a highly effective level? Could they just think like everyone else and have a simple life? Is that even possible anymore? Should they just let other people worry about the important problems in life and then do whatever the other people do? Should they adopt situational ethics and go with the flow?
The picture is clear. More than ever before knowing how to think, clearly, logically and critically is becoming very important. Teaching children to become effective thinkers is progressively more recognized as an important and immediate goal of education. The world is moving away from mass production toward more and more service and particularly something called the knowledge economy which means that the new source of production is having information and knowing how to use it to create something worthwhile and valuable. And that requires greater and greater skills in thinking. Complex communication and expert thinking are rapidly replacing normal cognitive activity (remembering and understanding) and normal manual skills (see the box on the next page). The future world, this knowledge economy, requires students who to be comfortable with abstract ideas and who have learned about the creativity required for innovation. If students are to be able to function successfully in a highly technical, knowledge-oriented society, they must be structured with thinking skills and habits of lifelong learning. This is a very different kind of education than what most of us have received and what most of our children are currently receiving.
There are five elements involved in good, logically, critical and creative thinking. These
•the skills involved in effective and efficient learning which are often called cognitive processing strategies,
•the mastery of the logic and structure of what is being learned
•awareness of what one knows and does not know, and how one knows and how one thinks, and what one wants (dispositions), usually called metacognition,
•the standards of guidelines for the validity and reliability of what one knows, called intellectual standards, and,
•the knowledge and skills involved in solving problems in different subjects or domains.
This book provides a clear and systematic presentation of what is involved in critical thinking and how parents can and should be the guides to showing, stimulating, leading and orienting their children to be critical thinkers. The book offers dozens of examples and concrete suggestions about how to teach critical thinking to your children.
The picture is clear. More than ever before knowing how to think, clearly, logically and critically is becoming very important. Teaching children to become effective thinkers is progressively more recognized as an important and immediate goal of education. The world is moving away from mass production toward more and more service and particularly something called the knowledge economy which means that the new source of production is having information and knowing how to use it to create something worthwhile and valuable. And that requires greater and greater skills in thinking. Complex communication and expert thinking are rapidly replacing normal cognitive activity (remembering and understanding) and normal manual skills (see the box on the next page). The future world, this knowledge economy, requires students who to be comfortable with abstract ideas and who have learned about the creativity required for innovation. If students are to be able to function successfully in a highly technical, knowledge-oriented society, they must be structured with thinking skills and habits of lifelong learning. This is a very different kind of education than what most of us have received and what most of our children are currently receiving.
There are five elements involved in good, logically, critical and creative thinking. These
•the skills involved in effective and efficient learning which are often called cognitive processing strategies,
•the mastery of the logic and structure of what is being learned
•awareness of what one knows and does not know, and how one knows and how one thinks, and what one wants (dispositions), usually called metacognition,
•the standards of guidelines for the validity and reliability of what one knows, called intellectual standards, and,
•the knowledge and skills involved in solving problems in different subjects or domains.
This book provides a clear and systematic presentation of what is involved in critical thinking and how parents can and should be the guides to showing, stimulating, leading and orienting their children to be critical thinkers. The book offers dozens of examples and concrete suggestions about how to teach critical thinking to your children.
189 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 17, 2013
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