If you spend any time on any social media platform or if you engage at all in the world, you likely realize that civil discourse has lost at least a bit of its footing in any conversation involving differences of opinions, especially around hot-button topics, like politics and current events. This kind of engagement in recent years has caused some experts to wonder whether we are witnessing the disappearance or at least the decline of critical thinking.
These same experts suggest causes for this include information overload which has led to a passive consumption of news and information without the necessary questioning and vetting of news or information. Additional factors, they argue, involve cultural conformity, an increase in AI technology and some people’s reliance on it to help formulate their opinions, and that schools rely more on memorization of facts and rote teaching approaches that do not encourage or prioritize students questioning information and authority or researching and exploring different ways to solve problems and form their own opinions.
I suppose there are some kernels of truth in some of these points; it can be easier to go with the flow, with popular opinion, rather than consider our own ideas. But whether critical thinking is truly disappearing, I don’t pretend to know for certain whether that is true or not. What I do know is that we are doing what we can in our family and in our unschooling adventures to promote critical thinking and an understanding of the elements of arguments, including spotting fallacies, to provide our teenagers with the tools they need to navigate the barrage of information in the world.
They are quick studies and we have spent more than a little bit of time considering logic and looking at how to identify popular fallacies in advertising and politics as well as in the formation of arguments and debates. As part of this process, both in our unschooling studies and in how we live our life, we have always encouraged our girls to question the things they don’t understand or, even more, to ask questions in order to understand the why behind things that many may take for granted. In fact, we have also always encouraged them to question us and why behind our rules and what we believe. All of this has been done with an eye to help our girls think for themselves.
Honestly, I love that they have embraced this over the years. As a matter of fact, I continue to enjoy witnessing them wrestle with concepts and ideas they do not yet fully understand. I love that they can sit back when we are reading about history in The Mystery of History curriculum we use or when we are reading a nonfiction biographical picture book or even one of Shakespeare’s plays and consider the material. I love that their minds bubble with questions and curiosity.
As we have explored ancient civilizations and the Renaissance, they have questioned the violence and wars and what drives people to such extremes. When we read nonfiction books about African Americans who lived and some who even thrived during segregation and the vitriol of racism, my girls question the motivation of such hatred based solely on a person’s skin color. As teenagers who are neurodivergent, our girls understand feeling like an outsider, feeling lonely, and being bullied and therefore they are quick to defend the underdog status of others like themselves, whether based on skin color, religion, or gender. Their questions often go beyond some of these somewhat “obvious” subjects that should cause all of us to stop, question, consider, and eventually engage with the subject and those affected by it (which is all of us).
One of the things I love and enjoy is the questions they pose around the fiction stories we read, including the plays of William Shakespeare. And, honestly, Shakespeare truly sparks question after question as you encounter his characters and his stories. As a writer, I am acutely aware that I tend to include details and scenarios in my stories I hope will give a reader pause, pause to pause and contemplate and wonder about and question my characters, their choices, their circumstances, and the world they are steeped in. Certainly that is the case with books like The Hunger Games, The Hobbit & the related Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and even the simpler stories we’ve read like The Wild Robot and the newest Kate DiCamillo’s The Norendy Tales, including The Puppets of Spelhorst, The Hotel Balzaar, and Lost Evangeline.
Perhaps one of my favorite questions to date has to be one of the recent ones posed by my 15 year old when we were in the middle of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: why do so many of Shakespeare’s characters go mad? That, my girl, is a fantastic question. And that is the kind of question my girls like to pose to me. And, these are the kinds of questions that provide us opportunity to learn more not only about Shakespeare and why he made the writing choices he did, but also about human nature and what might cause someone to be wild with grief or to act mad when they are not (which of course is where the phrase, there’s a method to his madness comes from, which is an awesome discovery).
But it is their willingness to pose questions, to be curious, and to go beyond the obvious and cursory knowledge of ideas and subjects and even stories that I love watching. I love the way they engage with ideas, with questions, and even with each other. I see them practicing the skills that will benefit them and also the people around them. I see them understanding that it’s okay to question things and people and even themselves about what they think and feel and believe. Even as the experts contend that critical thinking skills are on the decline, I know that I am seeing the opposite in these two remarkable young ladies, in these posers of questions. And because of that, I believe the world will be a better place as these two engage with it and the ideas it puts forth.