Critical Thinking Skills 101
Critical Thinking Skills: What They Won’t Teach Kids in School
America is intellectually lazy. The education system in America is a train wreck. Teachers don’t teach - they indoctrinate. Our kids are being brainwashed into accepting that America is systemically racist and we need to make reparations to ‘fix’ the sins of our past. Critical Race Theory is being pushed at every level of education and ‘wokeness’ is the new headmaster in every major institution. We cannot escape it because they don’t teach Critical Thinking Skills anymore.
The Leftist mob uses ‘political correctness,’ to threaten and intimidate anyone that dares push back against their radical messaging. The media is far, far Left and, of course, perpetuates this messaging. Hollywood gives themselves accolades and awards for their ‘wokeness,’ while most Americans are suffering. In the 1960s, the college campus was the hotbed of expressive thought and new ideas. It was where revolutions were cooked up. But today, college campuses are little different than Soviet gulags. Most professors are communists/socialist/Marxists who deamnd obedience to the ideological narrative THEY subscribe to. Free speech is not allowed on the modern college campus. Any speech or debate that is not in alignment with the far Left messaging is quickly and even violently stomped out. Bullying of anyone that thinks differently from the mob is rampant and conservatives keep to themselves, lest they be socially ostracized or expelled.
I blame us parents. I really do. At some point in the 1960’s, we decided that it was more important to have big houses, multiple cars and surround ourselves with things, than it was to maintain a stable, nuclear family. Of course, there were improvements that America needed to make, but my question has always been - at what cost?
As both parents started working full time to accumulate ‘the American Dream,’ they also farmed out 100% of the responsibility of their children’s education to the public educators. This gave enormous power to the teachers in the classroom. As the Teacher’s Union grew, it was quickly dominated by radical Leftists who began shaping the curriculum to fit their narrative.
Soon, gone were the history lessons about American Exceptionalism and they were replaced by what we see today. And that narrative is clear: “America is fundamentally racist and we need Big Government to ‘fix’ this problem.”
The very first thing the educators did was stop teaching critical thinking skills – and they did this to protect themselves against any challengers in the classroom. The result is three generations of intellectually weak Americans who never challenge others in what they are saying, nor themselves in what they believe.
So here are the steps to learn how to question the narratives we are being fed on the news, social media and in the local coffee shop.
Step One: Evaluate the Information
This is what I call the “Stop, Drop and Roll Moment.” When I take in a new piece of information, I’m asking the following questions to help me evaluate it.
Who is giving me this information?
What is their slant on the message?
Why are they sharing this information?
What other possible angles can I think about?
How do I verify this information from another source?
What is fact and what is bias?
Gone are the days when we could simply trust the news media. I should point out that the media has been manipulated since the beginning of time, but let’s just say that the Rockefellers, JP Morgan and other early 20th century robber barons were buying up local newspapers and installing their own, hand-picked editors in the late 1910s and 1920s to lobby for the creation of the Federal Reserve. This allowed American financial power to be concentrated by a cartel of legitimate bankers who have been stealing our money ever since. But that is a different story…
The point is that when we take in new information from any source, we CANNOT take it at face value. The democrat party hinges on half-truths and blatant lies. The American media is the public relations firm for democrats. That being said, it is important to fully inspect, research, and validate any information. It is intellectually lazy to merely trust what you see on TV or believe what you see in social media.
Step Two: Reasoning
Once you’ve dug deep into step one, it’s time to understand the information on a deeper level. We do this through reasoning, which requires that we zoom out and look at the bigger picture of why this information exists. A critical key here is to understand the context of the information and see how it fits into the current environment.
Leftist teachers and university professors have worked in lockstep for 50 years to manipulate and change the history that we learn to fit their narrative, so this is much more difficult than you can imagine. If you rely on Google for your searches, for example, just know that they censor people, companies, individuals and information. Google only allows you to search what they want you to see and they will hide or eliminate anything that challenges their radical Leftist ideology.
Don’t give up hope, though. Do your homework and start use your reasoning to parse the different pieces of information together. Compare what you learn to what has happened in the past. Fire up your mind and continue to hone your reasoning skills.
Step Three: Problem Solving
Inevitably, you are going to find some disparities between the new information you consumed and what you discovered upon further review. This is going to require some problem solving skills. Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the kind of problem solving you hated in elementary school. The kind I am talking about looks like this:
What is the difference between the new information and what I discovered independently?
Are there any commonalities? What part of the information is true?
How important are the differences?
What if I’m wrong in my analysis? Who could this information impact for good? For bad?
Step Four: Decision Making
This is the step when we have to decide what part, if any, of the new information is useful and what part is not. Always remember that the media, politicians, educators and Hollywood will pressure you to conform. It’s not what they tell you, sometimes it is what they DON’T tell you. But we’ve got to be thoughtful in how we consume information, knowing that there may be bias in it. And not everything we hear from those sources is a lie or totally inaccurate, so we’ve got to decide which part is relevant and useful and which part to dismiss.
Conclusion:
I’m a big fan of the idea that ‘you do you.’ I’m not interested in bullying you into believing what I believe. I’m perfectly comfortable learning new ideas and ways of thinking from people that are diametrically opposed to me because that makes me intellectually strong. My belief system has expanded immensely since I was 17 years old and the goal is to continue to grow until the day the Good Lord calls me home.
I’ve been called a ‘conspiracy theorist’ since I was in high school. Then, I publicly stated that the 1950s Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy actually had it dead on correct when he started calling out communists within the US Congress, Big Business and Hollywood. I’m not so sure he necessarily did it the right way, but he certainly wasn’t wrong. After the democrat party, media and cultural backlash silenced McCarthy, Communists rebranded themselves as Democrats and began a much more subtle, multi-pronged attack on Americans. They did it with the slow, subtle manipulation of history, news and the education system. The result is the mess we have today.
The solution is to teach ourselves and our children Critical Thinking Skills to challenge the pictures that both the Democrat Party and the GOP are trying to sell us.
My advice? Question Everything.