Our world is facing a lot of challenges, with even more coming. We need citizens and leaders who question things that are presented as “fact,” who ask critical and thoughtful questions of their leaders, and who think carefully about how they make decisions that impact their own and other’s lives. In short, this world is in desperate need of strong critical thinkers.
As a doctoral student, I spent four years studying college student and adult development, with a focus on whether innovative teaching and learning strategies were helping to foster critical thinking skills. I came to passionately believe that critical thinking skills are some of the most important skills we can emphasize in higher education. But as a parent, I became passionate about starting well before college.
Learning to think critically and to make decisions based on those thinking skills is a lifelong pursuit; even traditional-age 18-24-year-old college students do not always possess the complex analytical skills that allow them to balance their own needs with the needs of others or to analyze the extent to which an “expert’s” perspectives are well-informed. We can’t expect our young kids to achieve these skills right away either, but we can plant the seeds that will help them to be prepared for complex thinking as they grow older.