If you’re familiar with the Critical Thinker Academy then you know something about my background. You know that I’m a philosopher of science by training, that I’ve had many years of experience teaching logic and critical thinking at the university level for many years, and that I’m now working full-time promoting critical thinking concepts and values to the broader public.

This background puts me in a good position to talk about the academic components of critical thinking, the sorts of skills and topics that typically show up in critical thinking textbooks and that are measured on standard tests of critical thinking abilities.

But the topic of this course isn’t really about the academic components of critical thinking. It’s about raising children and teenagers with a critical spirit and nurturing the attitudes and values and habits of thought that constitute this critical mindset. It’s not obvious that someone who teaches critical thinking is automatically an expert in these questions.

So let’s be clear, I’m not an expert in child development or parenting or childhood education. I don’t have any special training or certification in these areas.

I am, however, a parent of two children — a son age fourteen, and a daughter age twenty, at the time of this writing — who has been actively involved in their upbringing and education.

My wife and I made a decision early on that we wanted to homeschool our kids, and we were active homeschooling parents for fourteen years.

My wife was largely responsible for elementary and middle school education, while I’ve been largely responsible for high school subjects. Our daughter was “dual-enrolled” at the local public high school from the beginning of 9th grade, so every year for the four years of high school she took some classes at the high school, but most of her academic subjects were handled at home. My son was homeschooled exclusively until 9th grade, when he started full-time at a local high school. I’m still actively involved in my son’s schooling, supervising homework, etc.

This background doesn’t make me an expert on homeschooling, but it did provide a context for my wife and me to think and learn about different approaches to homeschooling and different philosophies of childhood education. Some of these philosophies include

• “classical education” that is literature-oriented and organized around the classical liberal arts (the trivium and the quadrivium)
• the “Mason” approach, based on the teaching methods of British educator and philanthropist Charlotte Mason (has some similarities to classical education)
• Montessori education, based on the teaching methods of the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori
• Waldorf education, based on the teaching methods of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner
• Krishnamurti education, based on the holistic cosmopolitanism of Indian speaker and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti
• education methods inspired by psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences”
• “unschooling” and “natural learning” approaches where learning is directed primarily by the child’s interests than by a preset curriculum (e.g. John Holt, John Taylor Gatto)

As a nerdy academic I was compelled to read up on all these approaches and over time developed a small library of books on homeschooling philosophies and methods.

I also became familiar with the range of social and political arguments in favor of homeschooling and critical of traditional public education. Many homeschoolers are motivated by religious concerns about the dominance of secular values in the public school system, but there are also arguments for homeschooling from the libertarian right and the progressive left that aren’t religiously motivated at all.

Now, an interesting theme that is shared by many of these different homeschooling philosophies is the belief that traditional public education has failed to properly nurture critical thinking skills in students, and (not surprising) that their respective methodologies do a better job of doing so.

From my perspective as a philosopher who regularly taught critical thinking to university students, and as a homeschooling parent reading through this material and talking to other homeschoolers, I found myself continually thinking about the relationship between what I was teaching my students and how we were educating our children at home.

The result is that over the years my views about the nature of critical thinking have co-evolved with my views about the goals and methods of education more broadly, and my personal experiences as a homeschooling parent. I don’t think about critical thinking the way I did when I first started teaching in the mid-90s. My views have changed, and they’ve changed partly as a result of my experiences as a parent trying to nurture critical thinking capacities and values in my children.

So, I don’t claim any special authority in parenting or child psychology, or special success as a homeschooling parent. But I think I can offer a unique perspective that is informed by my academic background as a philosopher and critical thinking instructor, and my experience as a parent and homeschooling educator.