Lesson 1.12 Facione's Critical Thinking

Welcome to the worldwide community of people advancing critical thinking. Please know that you have like-minded colleagues all over the world, in every profession, in every country, on every continent. My name is Peter Facione, and I am only one of the many people who believes that teaching ourselves and others how to reason well will benefit everyone with whom we share this planet. Critical thinking, as you know, is the human process of forming reflective well-reasoned judgments about what to believe or what to do. As such, it relies on our skills of analysis, interpretation, inference, evaluation, explanation, and, most importantly, self-reflection. But more, it is motivated by our desire to seek the truth courageously, to ask challenging questions, to be open-minded, to trust in the power of reason, and to make wise and thoughtful choices. The skills are important, and so is the consistent internal motivation to apply those skills to problem-solving and to decision-making in every part of our lives. Critical thinking is the process of using those skills with a positive motivation and mindset to form a reasoned judgment. I am sure you know the challenge of developing strong critical thinking. We can achieve this goal only by active engagement, not by memorization. Critical thinking must be practiced each day and in many different contexts – in our personal lives, in our learning, in our workplaces, and in our community activities. Critical thinking is a powerful force, it can liberate our minds from false ideas, it enables us to engage questions scientifically, it gives us the capacity to evaluate the credibility of the claims that we see in the media, and it demands that we follow reasons and evidence wherever they may lead. Critical thinking is skeptical without being cynical. How important is critical thinking today? It is the singularly most important outcome of all of education. It is our only and best hope to free ourselves from the tyranny of superstition, manipulation, and ignorance. Thank you for being a person who strives to free the minds of people everywhere. And thank you for empowering them to solve problems and make good decisions using strong critical thinking.