I’m going to start with how I’m imagining the audience for this course. The title is “How to Raise a Critical Thinker”, so I’m going to assume two things.

One: You’ve got children, or you plan to have children, or are responsible in some way for the education of children. These can be toddlers or preteens or high school age kids.

Two: You’re interested and care about critical thinking, whatever you take that to mean. You think critical thinking is important and valuable. You want your children or the children you’re responsible for to grow into adulthood as critical, independent thinkers who have the ability and the desire to think and make decisions for themselves.

And very likely, you think that the public education system largely fails in this regard, or at least isn’t doing as much as it should to develop the critical thinking skills and attitudes that you think are important.

You might even go further and believe that contemporary society as a whole is seriously lacking in these skills and attitudes, and you worry about the broader social consequences of this.

If this description strikes a chord in you, then you’re the audience for this course.

I fit this description, so we have this much in common! I’ve got kids, I’m interested in them growing up to become independent critical thinkers, and I think we all suffer greatly as a society for the lack of it.

So, if you’re my target audience, that means I don’t have to waste a lot of time selling you on the importance of critical thinking. You’re already on board, I’m preaching to the choir.

But I’m also going to assume that you don’t have any formal training in logic or argumentation, you haven’t taken a critical thinking course in college, you’re not an expert on fallacies and cognitive biases and the psychology of human reasoning. Some of you no doubt have some background or exposure to these topics, that’s partly why you’re interested in the first place. But I’m not going to assume any prior background.

Here’s how I imagine the setup for this discussion. I’ve invited a group of you over to my house for a social evening. The topic is “how to raise a critical thinker”. We talk, we ask questions, we share experiences. And I share my perspective on this question, over the course of a couple of hours.

That’s it. We don’t break out notebooks and start working on logic problems. We don’t open up Aristotle’s text on rhetoric and persuasion. We don’t memorize lists of logical fallacies. No one is going to walk home after two hours and magically become an expert on any of these topics.

But you don’t have to be an expert in logic to be effective in nurturing the critical spirit in your children. There’s a lot we can do to stimulate and support the critical thinking faculties in our kids without ourselves becoming experts on arcane technical subjects.

And that’s the main point I want to communicate in this discussion. But to understand why this is the case, and how to think about strategies for encouraging critical thinking in our children, we’ll need to talk more broadly about what critical thinking is, and the different skills and aptitudes that constitute critical thinking. Once we’ve got that under our belt than it’ll be easier to see what sorts of methods might be effective in developing critical thinking skills, and more specifically, developing those skills in children and teens.