Has critical thinking ever been taught? Feel like itās just something you have or you donāt.
Critical thinking is essentially learning to ask good questions and also caring enough to follow the threads you find.
For example, if mental health is to blame for school shootings then what is causing the mental health crisis and are we ensuring that everyone has affordable access to mental healthcare? Okay, we have a list of factors that adversely impact mental health, what can we do to address each one? Etc.
Critical thinking isnāt hard, it just takes time, effort.
I have the impression that most people (or maybe itās my faith in Humanity thatās at an all time low and itās really just āsome peopleā) just want pre-chewed explanations given to them rather than spend time and energy figuring things out themselves - basically baby pap as ideas food rather than cooking their own ideas food out of raw ingredients.
Certainly that would help explain the resurgence of Populist sloganeering and continued popularity of Religion (with itās ever popular simple explanations of āDeity did itā and āitās the will of Deityā)
British primary schools used to have something called āproblem solvingā it was usually a simple maths problem described in words that required some degree of critical thinking to solve. e.g. A frog is at the bottom of a 30m well, it climbs 7m each day but in the night it slides 3m back down in its sleep. You canāt just calculate 30/(7-3) because it doesnāt account for the day the frog gets over the top and thus doesnāt slide back down in its sleep.
Not the most complex problem but pretty good for kids under 10 to start getting the basics.
