Critical Thinking! A useful way to success.

Critical thinking is a type of clear, reasoned thinking. Critical thinking means making clear, reasoned judgement. While in the process of critical thinking, ideas should be reasoned and well thought out/judged. The National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking defines critical thinking as the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.

Major critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation, and meta-cognition. It includes:

• Evidence through reality
• Context skills to isolate the problem from context
• Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
• Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
• Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand

Having the ability to think critically is an important skill that many people lack. Critical Thinking is the best way to solve problems since it requires looking at an issue from several standpoints before reaching a final decision. In history, both Socrates and Buddha preached about the important role that critical thinking plays in an individual’s ability to reasonably reflect on an issue and subsequently decide what to do or believe.

Critical thinkers must take the contexts of every situation into account and think on a multi-level platform in order to come to just conclusions. Home-schoolers have an advantage for learning critical thinking skills because they can largely make their own curriculum and incorporate critical thinking lessons into it—as every educational system should do. Learning how to recite information from textbooks is not going to help a person achieve long-term success. Only when an individual is able to make educated choices on complex matters can they truly be considered intelligent and competent.

The Critical Thinking Community is dedicated to enhancing critical thinking. The Center for Critical Thinking and Moral Critique and the Foundation for Critical Thinking are two sister educational non-profit organizations associated with the critical thinking community. These organizations work closely together to promote educational reform and essential change in education and society through the cultivation of fair-minded critical thinking. Mostly, the organizations promote asking discussion-inducing questions in learning environments.