Critical Thinking's Moment

Oct 2
Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash
We are in the soup. It’s a murky soup, bubbling with so many ingredients it can be hard to pick out what’s nutritious, what’s filler, and what’s poison. Historians will define this time period (in part) as the information era, when we suddenly had access to unprecedented quantities of digital information and struggled to make sense of it all. 

I came of age alongside the internet, shifting from wonder to concern as I experienced the impact of so much instant information at my fingertips. There was no off switch, and after seven years with a smart phone I had a queasy thought: at the end of my life, would I wish I had logged more hours on Facebook or the News app? The answer was obvious, and I’ve been in an uphill battle ever since.
AI, launched for the supposed noble purpose of making our lives better, has only added to the soup with endless screeds of information, mimicking the rest of us like an army of overconfident, mansplaining bores. Is there a use case for artificial intelligence? Of course, but almost four years into the public release of LLMs, we are seeing a disturbing trend towards cognitive surrender and generally reduced thinking skills. 

All this to say: we need critical thinking now more than ever, and at last we all seem to know it. This skillset keeps us savvy, separating the good information from the garbage. However, critical thinking is about more than evaluating information; it includes problem solving and discerning biases, all everyday cognitive skills that help us make better decisions and improve our lives. 

Critical Thinking Education

So how do we teach critical thinking, and are we doing enough of it? Despite being the homeland of modern critical thinking theory in education, the U.S. underfunds its public education across all levels, and critical thinking is one of the skillsets that gets uneven treatment from a learning perspective, even at the college level. While I can’t change the course of our behemoth educational systems overnight, I’m crafting my own critical thinking education. I’m an adult educator and learning designer, so I’ve given a lot of thought to how to teach this topic in a way that doesn’t make peoples’ heads swim. 

If you’re interested, check out my Critical Thinking: Let’s Get Started video on YouTube. Hey, I’ve got to go where the masses are. I’ll be creating more critical thinking learning content in the coming months, alongside live learning sessions and activities in the greater Philadelphia region. My long term goal is to get dedicated CT curricula baked into most education systems- obviously not something I can take on singlehandedly, so if you’re a likeminded individual with ideas, please reach out! 
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