The Importance of Teaching Critical Thinking

Throughout your life, you’re continuously not taught how to think. But schooled what to think about. What you should believe. Who to vote. How to dress. How to comb your hair. Where to work. What to work. And even, in some countries, who to date and marry.

The most effective way to foster the ability to reason in others is by teaching them the following:

1. Analyzing information.


2. Sharing ideas and concepts.


3. Making connections between ideas.


4. Sifting through important and unimportant tasks.


5. Producing new and original ideas

Patiently document everything your mind creates – also called journaling. This is by far – at least for me – the best way to revise my thoughts and steer myself both mentally and physically towards a better location.6

Here are a couple of exercises to inspire critical thinking:

1. Teach something you don’t know : Based on the Feynman learning technique – part of the mental models for learning. The best way to learn something is to teach it. Consider something you want to understand and arm yourself with the task to teach it to a group of people. What do you need to