CRITICAL THINKING
Critical thinking is a skill that appears to be learned and used by few people. It is a skill that needs to be developed and cultivated over time with experience. Ideally, parents should feel responsibility to develop critical thinking in their children starting from a young age and encourage its development up to the point the child ventures off on their own. Sadly, parents do not consciously do this and leave basic parental responsibilities to the school system. Schools are not teaching critical thinking, but appear to reinforce decisions based on emotions rather than gathering facts. The question then emerges. How do we teach someone to think critically?
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” This is true, but if you are used to making decisions based on feelings this statement will mean nothing to you. Opposing this is the statement, “feelings don’t care about your facts.” This is why a population that doesn’t critically think is dangerous. Facts will mean nothing to people who react to emotions. Politicians know this and use it to their advantage to win votes. Who needs facts when you can control people with emotions? If facts oppose your agenda, spin and spin until peoples’ emotions support you. Facts be damned. To fight this, children need to be taught how to separate their mind from their emotions. This is not easy and takes practice until a new habit is formed. Once this habit is created it becomes automatic to notice your emotion, separate yourself from it, inspect it, and determine if your emotion aligns with the facts. At this point you can see that facts don’t care about your feelings.
Critical thinking is also developed through writing. Writing requires you to think. It requires the ability to string ideas together and put them together in a logical manner that makes sense to yourself, and to the readers. This cannot be done without first developing the ability to think critically. I think back to the many writing assignments I have had over the years while in K-12 and then later while I was in college. Through my education I developed the ability to research a topic, gather information, and then put it all together. This could not have been done without learning how to think critically. Through writing, critical thinking is practiced and honed repeatedly until it becomes second nature. I can hear people saying that they have read many articles written from an emotional position that ignored facts. This is true and I have noticed this as well. Writers who do this have an agenda to raise emotions in their readers so that they can be easily manipulated. Writers who do this are still using critical thinking when they write, but do so with the intent to mislead. Either way, you have to be able to think critically in order to write.
It is imperative that we teach ourselves and the next generation to think critically. Practice mindfulness which basically is the ability to be aware of emotions and having the courage to analyze them in order to see if these emotions are supported by facts. Then write about it. As you write about your emotions. and events that cause these emotions, the skill of critical thinking will be developed. This will become easier with practice and the brain will be rewired to separate itself from emotions. Allowing you to be aware of your emotions and determine if they are supported by the facts of the event. In order for us to create a better world, we must use critical thinking and pass this skill on to our posterity. I challenge myself and my readers to write in a journal daily, analyze your day by writing, challenge your emotions with facts, and question those who tell you what to think or how you should feel.
