Between my proposals to change Education it is essential that you explain the importance that the child will have throughout his life the critical thinking and offer you some ideas to help them develop it.
The importance of critical thinking
The pcritical training It is essential throughout our lives. It will allow us to discern what proposals or ideas are valid, detect logic errors and deceptions and be able to choose responsibly, consolidate and defend our way of seeing the world with justice, equity and without extremism.
It will help us not to follow a political party if it deceives or harms us, to value the beliefs of others and their own from autonomy and respect, not to fall into the hands of fakers and charlatans, to value human relationships and to know Choose the ones that don't harm us.
And also, as for scientific thinking, which will deserve an entry later, it will critical capacity which will help them understand it and even find new answers to the questions that remain open and to seek new solutions to the social and ecological problems of the future.
The basis of learning critical thinking
The basis of learning critical thinking It's simple: critical thinking. We must allow the child to learn through error and autonomous reflection, not through memorization.
We must allow you to offer your own answers without penalizing error, imagination or divergence. Never ever ridicule them, or use blackmail, or make them feel pressured, or confuse punishment accordingly.
Children with critical thinking
Children who think for themselves and exercise critical thinking they will question what we present to them as moral truths, norms, ideas, beliefs and answers.
Sometimes they will make us uncomfortable with our own contradictions. They will reveal our own ignorance and prejudices. They are wonderful. But to be able to accompany them we have to become capable of self-criticism, flexible and aware of our limits.
They are going to make us accept an idea that will hurt us: adults are not always right. We have to assume it and even understand and accept that the adults who raised us with love did wrong things and damaged us. Without that ability we will hardly help children to develop a critical thought real, because this is learned through its exercise.
It is not a matter of educating in anarchy, but in the capacity for reflection, questioning and revolution. We cannot fall into using learned helplessness as a strategy, nor threaten punishment, nor frighten them.
We cannot reproduce in them the need to obey authority without questioning it or refusing to follow unfair orders. I do not say that it is easier to educate in this way, but of course that is education, not training. We are with the children to help them become full and responsible adults, not in their subjects without their own criteria or capacity for disobedience. The road is complicated, but indispensable.
They are not docile, they do not accept without asking for explanations, they retain their right not to accept as valid everything we tell them. They may even manifest disobedience if they consider our orders unfair.
In that case, we must strive to trust us in important and safety issues, and we must also question ourselves with value and flexibility, which we take for granted as mandatory and immovable.
We do not intend to educate submissive sheep, but people with a critical ability and determination, right?
