The approaches to using them can include developing the ability to perceive stories from multiple perspectives and to challenge stereotypes. (These approaches can include using books that see things from a different position such as Braun and Bernardini’s ‘Trust me, Jack’s beanstalk stinks!: The story of Jack and the Beanstalk as told by the Giant’ and Gunderson’s ‘Seriously, Rapunzel Needed a Haircut’.) Some versions of fairy stories provide a focus on critical thinking in STEM, enabling students to examine science and technology issues, such that questions and hypotheses such as ‘Could Rapunzel have built a zip line using her hair to escape her prison tower?’ can be examined by students.
In general terms, the author makes frequent references to the value of using fairy stories in ways that develop and use critical thinking skills. A really good example is when a student asked why, in the story of ‘The Billy Goats Gruff’, Daddy and Mummy Gruff sent Baby Gruff first across the bridge. Now that’s a question worth asking.
]]>These very high percentages are in stark contrast to the attempts by the legislators of many US states who have introduced bills designed to ‘shield children from complexity, controversy, and differing perspectives’. These legislators should realise that critical thinking enables children to skilfully deal with complexity, controversy, and different perspectives.
]]>‘Just as citizens should grasp the basics of history, science, and the written word, they should command the intellectual tools of sound reasoning.’
These tools include critical thinking and they ‘are indispensable in avoiding folly in our personal lives and public policies. They help us calibrate risky choices, evaluate dubious claims, understand baffling paradoxes, and gain insight into life’s vicissitudes and tragedies.’
This emphasis on the public value of critical thinking fits perfectly with our mission at if…then which is to seek to ensure that its skills and dispositions are not only well developed but also used in a very wide range of contexts.
]]>She answered ‘Most observers would say the challenges of dealing with global warming; but this is linked to the tragic repudiation of science, rationality and fundamental common sense that has swept like a fever over much of the world. Thus, the greatest challenge is something like dealing with the self-destructive madness of humankind.’
This very much fits with the very great need for critical thinking to deal with so many of today’s big issues. We need to use critical thinking to cut through the deliberately distorted interpretations of evidence that is linked to the pandemic, to counter the misinformation about economic issues, and to highlight that saying one thing and then doing another is unacceptable.
In these ways, critical thinking has a huge role to play to counter ‘the tragic repudiation of science, rationality and fundamental common sense’. We should teach it in schools from Early Years onwards so that the next generation can reject the ‘self-destructive madness’.
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These are:
The desired levels of proficiency are detailed.
Since the possession of DELTAs is correlated with being employed, higher incomes, and higher job satisfaction, it is not surprising that the McKinsey report strongly recommends that governments use education to ensure that citizens have them. This recommendation fits very well with the well-established evidence that having critical thinking as a central aspect of the curriculum (at all levels) makes a significant positive difference to cognitive development and functioning. Beyond primary and secondary education, the report also stresses the value of continuing skill-development in adult-training systems and in lifelong learning.
It is therefore to be hoped that the profile of critical thinking can be raised significantly as part of the way in which people are prepared for work.
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