Raising Critical Thinkers Quotes

“Conversations are not one-dimensional; they always confront us with different ways of seeing and knowing.” To raise a critical thinker means giving our kids opportunities to discover what they know intimately and their barriers to understanding. Both.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Knowledge doesn’t assume morality or ethics (cf. genocide, segregation, religious conflicts, nuclear weapons, air and water pollution). Our unexamined biases interfere with how we apply what we learn. Knowing what to think is not the same as knowing how to think.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“A healthy education expands how a child sees their identity as one among many in the multifaceted world they inhabit.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Writing that doesn’t raise red flags but demonstrates CACAO—currency, accuracy, coverage, authority, objectivity—means you’re using your critical thinking skills at a high level in your reading and research.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“habit you can cultivate with your kids, then, is to read laterally. Anytime they reference a book or a website, ask them: What else do you know about the organization? Who are their experts? What standing does that writer have in their field?”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Teach your kids to ask these two questions: How’s the data measured? What are its benchmarks?”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Critical thinking starts with caring.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Books (offline, not on digital devices) are best for training our kids to be deep readers. Critically thinking about the content of what they read can only come after that immersive, slower-moving, undistracting experience. Naturally, reading proficiency is key here.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Visual literacy is the ability to construct meaning from images. It’s not a skill. It uses skills as a toolbox. It’s a form of critical thinking that enhances your intellectual capacity.” To decode an image or a symbol is to apply critical thinking skills to reading.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“it matters to name the features of what make us who we are so that we can become more conscious of when they’re activated when we teach, learn, lead, and parent. Similarly, our students and children do well to keep their identities in mind as they learn.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“How on Earth does this subject relate to who my child is and can be for themselves and others?”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Learning is timely, not timeless.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Savvy teachers and parents can ask questions like these: Are there other ways to approach this problem? Can you show me? What real-world situation might require using this mathematical operation? Why do you think this process works?”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“The art of questioning becomes the key to the thinking classroom. Educators should be questioning not to guide student thinking in line with theirs but to provoke thinking and to discover what students know and understand.” Critical thinking grows in an emotionally stable, supportive environment, where real problems are explored by teacher and student together.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“as teachers, our role is to take our students on the adventure of critical thinking. Learning and talking together, we break with the notion that our experience of gaining knowledge is private, individualistic, and competitive.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“In this case, the student was being asked to guess which answer was the most likely one in the mind of the test-creator. That’s a mind-reading skill many kids never develop well enough to be considered great students.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Frequently, by the time children reach 3rd grade, the sense of wonder with which they entered kindergarten—wonder out of which authentic thinking and thus thinking for oneself develops—has begun to diminish. By 6th grade it has practically disappeared. Children’s thinking focuses on what the teacher expects. A major contributing factor to this loss of wonder is the failure to properly nurture the true voices of children”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Critical thinking includes these two skills, then: criticality (of others) and awareness (of self).”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“One critical thinking skill we want our kids to master is the ability to name that storyteller.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“In publishing, we have an expression: “Content is king.” In academics, I like another motto: “Context is everything.” What you know, how you know it, why you know it, what you don’t know, why you don’t know—these invisible factors shape how we understand every subject under the sun.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Mastery of any subject is an illusion. Lifelong learning is expressed as a relationship, not a degree.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“Dissent in children looks like “disobedience” or a lack of cooperation. Our tendency is to double down on persuasion. In the old days, parents talked about a child’s obligation to obey parents, even when they didn’t understand the command. The child was literally taught that they were safer abandoning their critical thinking faculties in favor of trusting an adult authority. This kind of framework sets up a child for peer pressure in their teen years when a new authority emerges: the slightly older teenager! Today’s parents often believe they’re doing a better job than their parents. These parents don’t require obedience. They explain to the child why they, the parents, require cooperation from the child. I call this style of parenting “manipulative obedience.” The old and new parenting styles share the same goal: cooperation with a parent’s instruction. The difference now is that rather than cooperating for the sake of respecting authority, the child is also expected to agree with the parent’s reasoning. The space just got much smaller for critical thinking!”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age

“The academic task is about service—each of us contributing to the centuries-old great conversation in our field of study, using our voices to expand the symphony of ideas, for the flourishing of all people (my people, your people), everywhere. “What can I do where I am?” is the clarifying goal for a robust, meaningful education. Too often, schooling feels more like this: “I have to pass the math test so I can take another math test.”
― Julie Bogart, Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent's Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age