Foundation for Critical Thinking

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"Do You Embody Intellectual Perseverance or Do You Easily Give Up?" New Blog by Dr. Linda Elder, Educational Psychologist President & Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Critical Thinking --- Intellectual perseverance is the disposition to work your way through intellectual complexities despite frustrations inherent in the task. Questions that foster intellectual perseverance include: -Am I willing to work my way through complexities in an issue, or do I tend to give up when I experience difficulties? -Can I think of a complex problem in which I have demonstrated patience and determination in working through its difficulties? -Do I have strategies for dealing with complex problems? -Do I expect my mental well-being to be easy, or do I recognize the importance of persevering to change my bad habits of thought that cause me pain? Don’t give up on intellectual tasks on account of their difficulty. When you begin to think you can’t learn something, remind yourself that you can. If reading is hard for you, stick to it; reading important works is essential to deep learning, and is a powerful tool for mental wellness and self-actualization. These same benefits come from writing, so when writing is hard, keep trying. Don’t be afraid to work hard when you feel like giving up. Remember that no matter how good you are at thinking, you can always improve, and the failure to do so will undermine the quality of your life and the lives of others. In short, no matter how much you struggle with learning, keep working. Never give up. Be the captain of your own ship. Chart your own course in life. Internalize the Idea: Intellectual Perseverance Most people have more physical perseverance than intellectual perseverance. Many are ready to admit, “No pain, no gain!” when talking about the body. Most give up quickly, on the other hand, when faced with a frustrating mental problem that requires their best thinking. Thinking of your own responses, in your work or your personal life, how would you evaluate your intellectual perseverance on a scale of 0 to 10? Complete these statements: 1. In terms of intellectual perseverance, I would rate myself as follows… 2. I say this because… [Support your position with evidence.] 3. I could develop intellectual perseverance by routinely doing the following… For more on close reading and substantive writing, visit the Reading and Writing Alcove in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online: https://lnkd.in/gU9d-T92 ---- This blog is adapted from pages 167 and 173 of Linda Elder’s Critical Thinking Therapy: For Happiness & Self-Actualization (2025), available through Treely Green Publishing at https://lnkd.in/gJ8fwgHG.

"Recreations are not education; accomplishments are not education. Do not say, the people must be educated, when, after all, you only mean, amused, refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humour, or kept from vicious excesses. . . . Education is a high word; it is the preparation for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep, or by hap-hazard. The best telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to ourselves, we must be parties in the work." ~John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University (1852) https://lnkd.in/gvFdKXq8 https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

Tomorrow: Free Webinar Workshop "Recognizing and Handling Conflicts Using Critical Thinking" Wednesday, February 19th 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (10:00 a.m. PST) https://lnkd.in/ghN9nZfw Description: Human conflict can arise for numerous, often overlapping reasons that operate in tandem, including: -Clashing purposes, or purposes wrongly seen as clashing. -Ignorance or misconceptions of one another’s intentions, beliefs, or point of view. -Faulty assumptions. -Preoccupation with trivialities. -Differing views of what questions, goals, and risks are most important. -Egocentric and sociocentric thinking. -The impacts made by emotions and desires on reasoning. This list is far from exhaustive. In many cases, the true causes of a conflict remain unknown to one or each party involved. Participants may misapprehend the sources of strife, thereby stumbling down unproductive or counter-productive avenues of thought and communication; other times, they may disregard why friction is occurring as they focus entirely on concluding the dispute in their own favor. In all the above circumstances, critical thinking can help. It can shift focus from declarations to exploration – for example, by uncovering the roots of conflict through probing questions about such factors as relevant purposes, points of view, and how words are being used. It can illuminate misconceptions on each side of a disagreement by explicating ideas, assumptions, information, and interpretations. It can help highlight solutions by finding new information, raising prior questions that generate context, and reasonably evaluating implications. This webinar will discuss lesser-known ways that irrationality can provoke or worsen conflict, and it will offer methods of critically analyzing conflicts with a view of evaluating their components to find fairer resolutions.

"Few of us are good historians or philosophers in the matter of our own lives. But then, no one has encouraged us to be. . . . We don't see ourselves as shaping our experience within a framework of meanings, because we have not learned how to isolate and identify central issues in our lives. Rather we tend to believe, quite egocentrically, that we directly and immediately grasp life as it is. The world must be the way we see it, because we see nothing standing between us and the world. We seem to see it directly and objectively. We don't really see the need therefore to consider seriously other ways of seeing or interpreting it. As we identify our point of view (philosophy) explicitly, and deliberately put its ideas to work in interpreting our world, including seriously considering competing ideas, we are freed from the illusion of absolute objectivity. We begin to recognize egocentric subjectivity as a serious problem in human affairs. Our thought begins to grapple with this problem in a variety of ways. We begin to discover how our fears, insecurities, vested interests, frustrations, egocentricity, ethnocentricity, prejudices, and so forth, blind us. We begin to develop intellectual humility. We begin, in short, to think philosophically. Children have this need as much as adults, for children often take in and construct meanings that constrain and frustrate their development and alienate them from themselves and from healthy relationships to others." ~Richard Paul in "The Contribution of Philosophy to Thinking" https://lnkd.in/gtXTSBwQ To develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking resources, literature, videos, etc.: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

Free Webinar Workshop: "Recognizing and Handling Conflicts Using Critical Thinking" Wednesday, February 19th 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (10:00 a.m. PST) https://lnkd.in/ghN9nZfw Description: Human conflict can arise for numerous, often overlapping reasons that operate in tandem, including: -Clashing purposes, or purposes wrongly seen as clashing. -Ignorance or misconceptions of one another’s intentions, beliefs, or point of view. -Faulty assumptions. -Preoccupation with trivialities. -Differing views of what questions, goals, and risks are most important. -Egocentric and sociocentric thinking. -The impacts made by emotions and desires on reasoning. This list is far from exhaustive. In many cases, the true causes of a conflict remain unknown to one or each party involved. Participants may misapprehend the sources of strife, thereby stumbling down unproductive or counter-productive avenues of thought and communication; other times, they may disregard why friction is occurring as they focus entirely on concluding the dispute in their own favor. In all the above circumstances, critical thinking can help. It can shift focus from declarations to exploration – for example, by uncovering the roots of conflict through probing questions about such factors as relevant purposes, points of view, and how words are being used. It can illuminate misconceptions on each side of a disagreement by explicating ideas, assumptions, information, and interpretations. It can help highlight solutions by finding new information, raising prior questions that generate context, and reasonably evaluating implications. This webinar will discuss lesser-known ways that irrationality can provoke or worsen conflict, and it will offer methods of critically analyzing conflicts with a view of evaluating their components to find fairer resolutions.

Dr. Linda Elder, educational psychologist and Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Critical Thinking, discusses the importance of deliberately choosing important purposes while minimizing undue influence from the societies and social groups to which we belong.

"All subjects, in sum, can be taught philosophically or unphilosophically. Let me illustrate by using the subject of history. Since philosophical thinking tends to make our most basic ideas and assumptions explicit, by using it we can better orient ourselves toward the subject as a whole and mindfully integrate the parts into the whole. Students are introduced to history early in their education, and that subject area is usually required through high school and into college, and with good reason. But the unphilosophical way history is often taught fails to develop students' ability to think historically for themselves. Indeed, history books basically tell students what to believe and what to think about history. Students have little reason in most history classes to relate the material to the framework of their own ideas, assumptions, or values. Students do not know that they have a philosophy, and even if they did, it is doubtful that without the stimulation of a teacher who approached the subject philosophically they would see the relevance of history to it. But consider the probable outcome of teachers raising and facilitating discussion questions such as the following: 'What is history? Is everything that happened part of history? Can everything that happened be put into a history book? Why not? If historians have to select some events to include and leave out others, how do they do this? If this requires that historians make value judgments about what is important, is it likely that they will all agree? Is it possible for people observing and recording events to be biased or prejudiced? Could a historian be biased or prejudiced? How would you find out? How do people know what caused an event? How do people know what outcomes an event had? Would everyone agree about causes and outcomes? If events, to be given meaning, have to be interpreted from some point of view, what is the point of view of the person who wrote our text? Do you have a history? Is there a way in which everyone develops an interpretation of the significant events in his or her own life? If there is more than one point of view that events can be considered from, could you think of someone in your life who interprets your past in a way different from you? Does it make any difference how your past is interpreted? How are people sometimes harmed by the way in which they interpret their past?' These questions would not, of course, be asked at once. But they should be the kind of question routinely raised as part of stimulating students to take history seriously, to connect it to their lives, minds, values, and actions. After all, many of the most important questions we face in everyday life do have a significant historical dimension . . . " ~Richard Paul in "The Contribution of Philosophy to Thinking" https://lnkd.in/gtXTSBwQ

"A substantive concept of education not only highlights the qualities of the educated person, but also implies the proper design of the educational process. There are essential minimal conditions for cultivating educated minds. These entail modes of instruction that facilitate development of the standards, abilities, and traits of the educated person. All of the traditional content areas of school may be, but typically are not, taught so as to conduce to those standards, abilities, and traits. For example, when history is substantively taught, it is taught as historical thinking, the major goal: to give students practice in thinking historically (analyzing, evaluating, and reconstructing historical interpretations and problems). As a result, students learn not only how to read historical texts with insight and understanding, but also how to gather important facts and write well-developed historical essays of their own. Through this mode of instruction, students come to see the significance of historical thinking both in their own lives and in the life of culture and society. History becomes — in such a transformed mind — not random facts from the past, but a way to reason about the past to make intelligent decisions in the present and reasonable plans for the future. . . . When students are taught using a substantive concept of education as the guide to the design of instruction, they learn to initiate, analyze, and evaluate their own thinking and the thinking of others (within all the content areas they study). Doing so, they come to act more reasonably and effectively in every part of life. They are able to do this because they have acquired intellectual tools and intellectual standards essential to sound reasoning and personal and professional judgment. Self-assessment becomes an integral part of their lives. They are able to master content in diverse disciplines. They become proficient readers, writers, speakers, and listeners. They use their learning to raise the quality of their lives and the lives of others. They become reasonable and fair-minded persons capable of empathizing with views with which they disagree and disagreeing with views uncritically accepted by those around them. They are able to use their reasoning skills to contribute to their own emotional life and transform their desires and motivations accordingly. They come to think, feel, and act effectively and with integrity." ~Drs. Richard Paul & Linda Elder in A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Educational Fads (2019, Rowman & Littlefield) To be part of the solution and develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking literature, videos, activities, and so on: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37

“The history of education is also the history of educational panaceas, the comings and goings of quick fixes for deep-seated educational problems. This old problem is dramatically on the increase. The result is intensifying fragmentation of energy and effort in the schools, together with a significant waste of time and money. Many teachers become increasingly cynical and jaded. It is time to recognize that education will never be improved by educational fads, and that the manner in which educational trends are marketed guarantees that they will be transformed into fads. Fads by their nature are fated to self-destruction. Parents, educators, and citizen activists need to understand the problem of educational fads so that they can effectively distinguish substantive efforts at educational reform from superficial ones. Hence the motivation for this guide. By ‘fad’ we mean an idea that is embraced enthusiastically for a short time. In schooling, this typically means a short-lived emphasis on a seemingly wonderful new idea that will transform teaching and learning without much effort on anyone’s part. Since by definition a fad will quickly come and go, it cannot be expected to improve instruction in any significant way. By ‘trend’ we mean a general tendency or movement in a certain direction. Trends in schooling typically last 7-10 years, but may last longer. . . . Most educational trends or fads originate in reasonable ideas. All reasonable ideas about education enhance instruction when integrated into a substantive concept of education. They fail when imposed upon instruction through a non-substantive, fragmented conception of education, which is unfortunately typically the case in schooling today.” ~Drs. Richard Paul & Linda Elder in A Critical Thinker’s Guide to Educational Fads (2019, Rowman & Littlefield) Until students learn to think critically through content in a comprehensive, explicit manner, their “learning” amounts largely to the temporary memorization of atomized lists of data points and concepts, little to none of which they internalize for use in future reasoning. Until educators learn to think critically in a comprehensive, explicit manner, they cannot reliably design instruction that helps foster this ability in students. Until administrators learn to think critically in a comprehensive, explicit manner, they cannot reliably undertake professional development that helps foster this ability in educators. To be part of the solution and develop your reasoning, learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and teaching on your own schedule, consider a 30-day free trial in the Center for Critical Thinking Community Online, the world's largest digital repository of critical thinking resources, literature, videos, etc.: https://lnkd.in/gCi9FX37