Argument Ninja Dojo

How to Raise a Critical Thinker

Kevin deLaplante

I sometimes receive emails from parents of younger kids or teenagers who want to know what they can do to help their kids become better critical thinkers.

Let me show you two such letters. I’m not going to give the authors’ full names because I haven’t asked their permission, but this first one is from a mom named Machelle:

Dear Kevin,
Thank you so much for putting together the Critical Thinker Academy. I've been listening to the Argument Ninja podcast and learning a lot. My daughter is entering the 8th grade and I want to start more formal instruction in critical thinking, but I'm not sure where to begin. I've had her listen to some of the podcast and watch some of your YouTube videos, but she says she doesn't follow them. I don't know if it's that, or she's just a 13 year old and would rather be hanging out with her friends or watching anime. Would you please point me in the direction of one of your courses or any books I can start her on, or would you suggest I wait until she's a little older?

That’s one kind of question I get — “How can I help my kid become a better critical thinker?” — from a parent who is already sold in the importance of this, and is already familiar with some of the important ideas. And sometimes, like this one, it’s “how can I help my kid become more interested in critical thinking, and what’s the best way to approach this given where my kid is developmentally, or given my kid’s interests?”.

Those are really good questions.

Here's the second letter.

Hello, my name is Asher and I am 12 and a half years old. I would like to know how can I learn how to think like you? Are there any books or websites I can read to learn? And my sister is 5, how can I help her?

When I get an email like this I want to ask some follow-up questions, obviously. So I wrote Asher back, and said:

Hello Asher,
Good for you for caring about thinking! Not many kids your age are into that.
It might help to tell me a bit more about yourself. Where are you writing from? And what made you want to send me this email?

Asher wrote me back, and he said:

I found your show [the Argument Ninja podcast] because I was looking for karate stuff. When we lived in the U.S. I studied ken-zen-ichi and I have my brown belt. Listening to your shows made me think that it would be cool to train my brain the same way my father and I train in ken-zen-ichi. There are a lot of things that you talk about that I really do not understand, but I am willing to work hard and learn. Oh and thank you so much for writing me back.

So, Asher is a little Argument Ninja :).

Can you imagine how I felt getting this email? “Listening to your shows made me think it would be cool to train my brain the same way my father and I train in ken-zen-iichi”.

Yes, Asher, it would be cool, wouldn’t it?

In this post I talk about the importance of critical thinking education, specifically for kids and teens, and what parents can do to help their kids become better critical thinkers.

In the first half I’m going to talk about how I see the critical thinking challenges facing all of us today, but more specifically teenagers. And I’m going to do this from the perspective of the Argument Ninja approach to critical thinking.

In the second half of I’m going to give five recommendations for parents. I’m going to list these five recommendations right now, to give you a sense of what’s coming up, but in the second half of this post I’ll elaborate on these in some detail.

Here are the five recommendations:

Prioritize role-modeling
Role-model intellectual virtues
Depolarize your home
Be critical of social media
Develop the right background knowledge

I'm going to pitch at least parts of this post so that kids as young as Asher and Machelle’s daughter, kids as young as 12 and 13, can get something out of this.

What Are Critical Thinking Values?

:et me start off with what I think critical thinking is all about and why it’s important, and then I want to talk about why it’s especially important for young people growing up today.

This is what critical thinking is all about. Just three things:

True beliefs
Wise choices
Thinking for yourself

That’s it! These are the core critical thinking values. If you care about these three things, then you care about critical thinking.

First, does it matter to you whether what you believe is true or false? Do you want to increase the number of true beliefs you have and minimize the number of false beliefs? If so, you care about critical thinking.

Second, does it matter to you whether the choices you make are wise or unwise? Rational or irrational? Do you want to make wiser, better choices that reflect your true values and bring you closer to your true goals? If so, you care about critical thinking.

Third, does it matter to you that your thoughts, your beliefs, your values are your own? Does it matter to you that you’re not just repeating what other people say, that you’ve actually thought about and come to a judgment about an issue, so that you can legitimately say “that’s not just what my parents or my friends or the media says I should believe .. that what I believe, and here’s why I believe it …”. If being able to think for yourself matters to you, then you care about critical thinking.

This is what critical thinking is all about. True beliefs, wise choices, thinking for yourself. Very simple.

Now, the goal of critical thinking education is to improve your ability to do this.

That’s not so simple.

I think of the domain of critical thinking, the subject matter of critical thinking, as whatever has a positive or a negative effect on your ability to pursue each of these three critical thinking goals.

If something makes it easier or harder to believe truths and avoid falsehoods, that’s part of critical thinking.

If something makes is easier or harder to make wise choices, that’s part of critical thinking.

If something makes it easier or harder to think for yourself, that’s part of critical thinking.

My job, as a critical thinking researcher and teacher, is to learn as much as I can about what these factors are, that make critical thinking easier or harder for you, and to use that knowledge to help you become a better critical thinker.

Now, what if I told you that really smart people have been thinking and writing about these questions for over two thousand years, and there is a body of knowledge and a set of skills that is teachable, that can be learned, just like any other skill, that can make you a better critical thinker than you are right now?

Does that matter to you?

And what if I told you that, in learning this same set of skills, you can become a more informed and logical thinker who we can organize your thoughts and express yourself more clearly and effectively than you can right now?

Does that matter to you?

Because if none of this matters to you, there’s not much we can do.

But my guess is that it does matter to you. I’ve never met anyone, of any age, who said, after that little introduction I just gave, “naw, I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care if I believe crazy things. I don’t care if make stupid choices. I don’t care if I’m just parroting what other people tell me.”

We all care.

It’s just that we rarely talk about critical thinking in this way, as a skill that can be learned, through training and practice. It’s certainly not taught in our school system in any systematic way. So even if we care, we don’t know where to look for help, or even what real help would look like.

What I’d like to talk about here, though, is why critical thinking matters especially for young people, and what families can do, even without any formal training, to help everyone within the family, parents and children alike, become better critical thinkers.

Why This Matters Even More For Young People

Let’s talk about why these issues are especially important for young people. And here I want to talk directly to the teenagers reading this.

One obvious reason to care about the quality of your thinking and decision making is that the biggest risks that teenagers face — risks to your health and safety and well-being — are ones that are aggravated by your youth, by the fact that your brain and body are still developing.

As a teenager you should know that your greatest risk of death is by accidents, with car accidents being the most common cause of death. Next is death due to violence. And next is suicide. Then we have harms due to teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, drug and alcohol use, and eating disorders.

All of these risks are aggravated by the fact that your brain is still developing over your teen years, and the circuits that manage impulse control and emotional regulation and decision-making aren’t fully mature, and they won’t be fully mature, until your mid-20s.

This is important to know for both parents and teenagers. When you’re a young child your brain grows very quickly. By the age of six your brain is 90%-95% of its full adult size. But your brain needs a lot of remodeling before it can function as an adult brain.

This brain remodeling happens intensively during adolescence, and continues well past the end of puberty, into your mid-20s.

One of the main ways that your brain remodels itself is that the connections in the thinking and processing parts of your brain that aren’t used, get pruned away, while other connections that are used, are strengthened. That’s your brain’s way of becoming more efficient. But how you use your brain, during this period, can have a big effect on what gets pruned and what gets strengthened.

This pruning process begins in the back of the brain. The front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, is remodeled last. The prefrontal cortex is the decision-making part of the brain. It’s involved in solving problems, controlling impulses, and planning and thinking about the consequences of your actions. Like I said, development of this part of your brain continues right into your mid-20s.

(source)

Now, because your prefrontal cortex is still in the remodeling phase, when teenagers try to solve problems and make decisions, they make greater use of other parts of the brain, like the amygdyla, than adults do.

Your amygdyla is an almond-shaped set of neurons deep in the medial temporal lobe of your brain, and it plays a key role in processing emotions. It’s the part of the brain structure that is linked to instinctive emotional impulses like fear and aggression, but also instinctive pleasure responses.

This is just to say what your parents already know, that teenagers are more prone to risk-taking, and they have a harder time resisting their emotional impulses, and making choices that are in their own long-term best interests, than fully developed adults.

This makes you more vulnerable than a mature adult to the harms that can come from bad judgment. You’re also vulnerable because most of the people you hang out with are other teens, who are operating with the same developing brain, with the same vulnerabilities.

It’s in your interest, and your parents’ interest, to be aware of these facts about yourself, and where possible, to take steps to reduce the risks during this period of your life.

In other words, it’s in your interest to work on developing your critical thinking skills during your teen years, as you’re maturing, because that’s one of the times in your life when you’re most vulnerable to the consequences of bad judgment, and it’s a time when your brain is actively rewiring itself, to become better at performing the tasks that we’re asking it to do.

In this respect it’s like learning a language or any complex skill; they’re a lot easier to learn during your developing years than when you’re a fully grown adult.

So that’s our first reason why critical thinking education is especially important for young people.

The Light Side and the Dark Side

As I said, I want to talk about is what families can do, even without any formal training, to help everyone within the family become better critical thinkers.

I have some recommendations, which I will get to, but for these recommendations to make sense, I need to paint a bigger picture of the critical thinking challenges that we’re facing. So let me do this first, and then we’ll come back to the recommendations.

When I think about critical thinking, I think in terms of two complementary aspects, a Light Side and a Dark Side. Think about the light side and the dark side of the curvy yin-yang symbol.

The Light Side is the part that tells us what it means to reason well — what it means to have good reasons for your beliefs, what it means to make wise decisions, what it means to think critically and independently for yourself.

The Light Side is about how we ought to reason, and how we ought to behave, if our goals are truth, wisdom and independent thought.

The Dark Side of critical thinking is the part that tells us how we in fact reason. It tells us about how we actually form beliefs and make decisions, as the evolved biological and social creatures that we are. It tells us about human nature, how our minds work, why we behave the way we do, what makes a message persuasive to us, and so on.

I call this the Dark Side not because it’s bad, but because this is the part of critical thinking that deals with reality as it is, not as we wish it would be. This is the part that reveals how irrational and foolish we can be, how easily manipulated we are, and how vulnerable we are to influences that can hijack our thinking.

My view is that we need to understand both of these aspects, the Light Side and the Dark Side, if we want to improve our thinking.

In fact, my view is that you can’t master the Light Side without mastering the Dark Side, and vice versa. They’re mutually defining and interdependent. If you really want to improve as a critical thinker, you need to acknowledge and embrace this duality.

Self-mastery — mastering yourself — comes from mastering the duality of the Light and the Dark.

This is the Argument Ninja way, in a nutshell.

I say this, again, as part of the background for the recommendations that I’m going to talk about later. But I’ve got a couple other background topics I still need to cover.

The Martial Context of Critical Thinking

As regular followers will know, another key element of my approach to critical thinking is that I view critical thinking through the lens of the martial arts.

What does this mean? It means that there is a “martial context” to critical thinking.

The word “martial” means “relating to war or combat”. A martial context is a context in which there are external forces that pose a threat to your security and welfare, or the welfare of those you care about and want to protect, and where you are prepared to take action to resist these threats.

This doesn’t have to involve a threat of physical violence. For example, if you’re bombarded every day with persuasive messaging that is engineered to get inside your head, to influence what you think and do, messaging that is designed to serve the interests of companies, governments, political groups, the media, you name it … rather than your own interests, or the interests that truly matter to you, then I think you should take that as a real threat to security and well-being. Because it is.

And this is in fact what we’re facing. The great powers of our age are all competing for our attention, trying to influence our thoughts and our actions, and they’re using the most sophisticated persuasion technology human beings have ever devised to do it.

And you’re networked to this technology right now. You’re carrying it around in your pocket.

Social Media, Commercial Digital Culture, and the Martial Context of Critical Thinking

Another pillar of the Argument Ninja approach to critical thinking is to recognize that the digital culture that we’re immersed in, for most of the hours that we’re awake (myself included) is the channel through which these great powers are competing for our attention, and nearly all of what we experience is designed to influence how we think and what you do, in some way.

It might seem like the goal of Google or YouTube or Snapchat or Twitter or Facebook is to provide information or entertainment or a way of communicating with friends, or a platform for expressing yourself, but these are not the reasons why these platforms exist.

These platforms exist because they make money. And the way they make money is by selling your attention to third parties who are willing to pay for it. The product they’re selling is you.

The features of these platforms are designed to attract and hold your attention, and extract information about you, so that these third parties have the information they need to send you persuasive messages that have the best chance of influencing you, to use their service; to buy their product; to vote for their candidate … whatever their goals are.

All of this I view as part of the martial context of critical thinking in the 21st century. If you care about critical thinking, you should care about this, because the net effect of our immersion in this commercial digital culture, the one we’re inhabiting right now, is to undermine our ability to think independently and critically for ourselves. There’s just no doubt about this.

This is not to say that the internet doesn’t have great virtues as well, of course it does. But if we don’t have our eyes wide open, and understand what’s really going on, it’s as dangerous as swimming out from the beach and not realizing there’s a strong current that can carry us offshore.

This is all relevant to the recommendations I’m going to give, because this is one of those areas where parents and families can play a positive role in protecting ourselves from the negative effects of digital culture. I’ll come back to this later.

Polarization and Critical Thinking: One Ring to Rule Them All

I’ve got one more big topic to cover before I get to my recommendations. And if you’ve been following me for a while you should be able to guess what’s coming.

If you were to ask me to list all the different types of persuasive messaging that we’re subject to on a daily basis, that might be an interesting exercise, but it would be a very long list, and it would be hard to know what to do with that information.

But there’s another approach that I recommend.

If we looking to get the biggest bang for your buck, from a critical thinking standpoint, we should look for the factors that have the greatest negative impact on our ability to think critically, and strategically target those factors.

So, what has the biggest negative influence on our ability to think critically today? What is the Boss Battle that we have to fight if we want to win this game?

The biggest negative influence on our ability to think critically today, is excessive polarization: political, social and cultural polarization.

Polarization is about how different we feel we are from one another, or one group from another group.

When two groups are very polarized, and you’re a member of one of these groups, you’re more likely to think that the other group is not only wrong about everything — they’re wrong because there’s something fundamentally wrong with them, with the people in that group.

They’re deluded. They’re irrational. They’re immoral. They so different from you, it’s hard to identify or empathize with their point of view. It’s hard to see the world the way the people in that group see it.

Now, as human beings, straight out of the box, we’re already vulnerable to a host of cognitive biases that can distort our judgments.

Polarization feeds and amplifies these biases, and it makes them harder to recognize in ourselves. Polarization makes the Dark Side of human nature stronger, on almost every dimension.

At the risk of mixing my movie metaphors, when it comes to impediments to critical thinking, excessive polarization is the “One Ring to rule them all”.

So if we’re thinking strategically, this is an important target.

And there is no doubt that we’re living in a time where political and cultural polarization is very high. People feel it, it’s a real source of psychological stress. In one recent survey of Americans, a majority, 59%, said that this is the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember. They say that there is something dramatically different about the way we are talking right now – the divisiveness, the lack of civility, the hostility, the 24 hour news cycle that we can’t escape from. It’s hurting us.

This is obviously bad from a civic society point of view, but my point here is that it’s also bad from a straight critical thinking point of view. Whichever way you come down on the political issues, to the extent that we’re participating in this polarized culture, we’re living in an environment that is increasingly hostile to critical thinking.

And you teenagers today are watching all of this play out. Whether you’re politically engaged or not, you’re forming opinions about who you are, and what you should believe, by looking at how these issues are discussed within your families, among your friends, on tv, on the internet, and on social media. These are the models that will determine how you will think about these issues when you get older.

So, Mom, Dad … if we care about critical thinking, then we need to find a way to at least reduce the effects of this polarized culture on own thinking. And we need to find a way of nurturing healthier models of discourse, of how to talk and disagree with other people, and model these within our families.

Summing Up So Far

Now we’re in a position to talk more concretely about recommendations, and what parents can do for their children, and for themselves, to help them develop as critical thinkers.

But I’ve covered a lot, so I want to take a second to just summarize what we’ve talked about so far. There are three main points.

First, teenagers are particularly vulnerable to the consequences of bad judgment because they’re working with a brain that isn’t fully developed yet, and because of this, many of the cognitive faculties that are important to critical thinking aren’t as fully developed as they will be. But the good thing is that this provides an opportunity to intervene early and start building good critical thinking habits now, while those faculties are developing.

Second, children and teenagers are spending more and more time on social media platforms and interacting through digital culture. This digital environment is dominated by messaging that is commercially motivated, and it’s employing increasingly powerful persuasion technologies that exist to serve the commercial goals of third parties, not the critical thinking goals of users. These social media environments have become increasingly hostile to critical thinking. We need to find ways of protecting all of us, but especially teenagers, from the worst effects of this commercial digital culture.

And third, teenagers today are growing up in a political and cultural environment that is strikingly polarized. Excessive polarization is hostile to critical thinking, it brings out the worst in us. But this polarized discourse may have an even greater impact on young people, because this is the primary model of public communication that they’re exposed to. We need to find ways of reducing the effects of polarization, especially within family environments, and promoting healthier models of communication that actually serve the goals of critical thinking.

This is how I view the critical thinking challenge facing teenagers and parents today. These are the priorities, as I see them.

My recommendations will target these priorities.

Recommendation 1: Prioritize Role Modeling

My first recommendation isn’t so much a concrete recommendation, as it is a framework for thinking about the role of parents in raising critical thinkers.

The most common misconception that people have about critical thinking is that it’s primarily about learning to think logically. So they expect to be told that they need to start by learning some basic logic and argument analysis skills, and that will help them learn to spot errors in reasoning, and so forth.

That’s part of it, for sure, but the fact is that all the logic in the world won’t help if you aren’t motivated or inclined or able to use these skills, in the real world, when they’re needed.

You can teach an 8th grader basic logic, basic fallacies, decision theory, cognitive biases … you name it, they can learn how to answer questions and solve textbook problems. But the psychological world of an 8th grader is dominated by their social life — social acceptance, social status, the urge to gradually becoming more independent from parents, and the urge to seek out new experiences. And in that world, logic, rationally weighing costs and benefits, delaying gratification, long-term planning, all of that takes a back seat to these more immediate emotional and social impulses. Teens can get As on logic and critical thinking tests, and as soon as they’re together in a group, it’s like they never took the class.

So yes, at some point, I do believe that teenagers should be exposed to these formal tools for critical thinking. There is absolutely no question that it will pay off down the road. But if the psychological soil isn’t properly prepared, these critical thinking seeds that you’re planting won’t take root, they won’t grow. At this stage, our priority should be making sure the soil is well-prepared, so these seeds have the best chance of growing and flourishing.

So what does “preparing the soil” mean? What this means for parents is that, if you want your kids to grow up to become independent critical thinkers, your priority should be role-modeling the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that promote critical thinking values, that express a mindset and an orientation to the world that honors the values that we’ve been talking about — the value of truth, the value of wisdom, the value of independent thought — and nurturing those same attitudes and behaviors in your children. That’s how these values get internalized. That’s how the soil is prepared.

This is my first, high-level recommendation. Prioritize role-modeling. Don’t think about logic exercises and textbooks. There’s a time and a place for that, but not at the start. Think about modeling attitudes and behaviors that promote critical thinking values, and look for ways of nurturing these in your kids.

Recommendation 2: Role-Model Intellectual Virtues

The natural follow-up question to ask is, can you be more specific about the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that we’re talking about?

Yes we can, up to a point. In the literature on critical thinking education, these attitudes and behaviors are often called “intellectual virtues”.

We’re familiar with moral virtues, like compassion and honesty, that dispose us toward morally good actions. We’re not so familiar with the language of intellectual virtues, but these are aspects of a person’s character that make someone a good thinker, or a good learner, or a good decision-maker.

So we’re talking about character traits like openmindeness, curiosity, truth-seeking, and so on.

Now, it’s important to think of these not just as abstract values that we profess, but as traits that are expressed in our behavior. So, if someone is intellectually curious, for example, that virtue is expressed in certain behaviors, like asking questions, and asking follow-up questions, and seeking out certain kinds of information. If someone is open-minded, that virtue is expressed in behaviors like, giving a fair and honest hearing to competing points of view, or seeking out new points of view.

So it’s better to think of intellectual virtues as a combination of psychological attitudes and behavioral dispositions, tendencies to behave in certain ways, in certain circumstances. This is important to remember, because if we’re trying to role-model these intellectual virtues, that should always include a behavioral component. If I say I’m intellectually curious, that should make a difference to how I act in the world. And it reminds us that our goal, as parents, is for our children to not just echo what we say, but to acquire new habits of thought and behavior.

Now, the next natural question is, is there some agreed-upon list of intellectual virtues? Can we look this up somewhere?

The short answer is yes, there are lists that you can look up, but no, there isn’t a shared consensus on what these lists should look like.

In the 1990s there was a flurry of publications in educational psychology with different writers offering different lists of intellectual virtues or intellectual character traits. Some of them have seven or eight items, some have fifteen or sixteen items. There’s a lot of overlap, and I think it’s worthwhile to look at these, but I’m not going to do that here. I’ll leave links in the show notes, so if you’re interested you can follow up, but I take a somewhat different approach to this topic.

My view is that critical thinking “in the wild” is always critical thinking about something, some domain. What do I want to be able to think more critically about? Science? Politics? Religion? Relationships? Some intellectual virtues are more relevant in some domains than in others.

For example, if I’m interested in becoming a better critical thinker about the benefits and risks of alternative medicine — acupuncture, chiropractic, energy healing, homeopathy, etc. — then I’ll need to pay attention to critical thinking issues surrounding scientific methodology in the health sciences, and it’ll be important to develop intellectual virtues, and the relevant background knowledge, that are associated with good reasoning in this domain.

But if I’m primarily interested in critical thinking about politics, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of different political positions, the critical thinking challenges in this domain are different, so the intellectual virtues that I need to develop are different, or at least, not identical to ones that may be well suited to some other domain.

For example, we’ve been talking about the negative effects of cultural polarization on critical thinking. Polarization has broad effects, but it has a stronger negative effect on thinking about a political issue like transgender rights, or immigration policy, than it does on thinking about, say, the pros and cons of acupuncture, that aren’t so politicized.

So, I don’t think there’s a short list of intellectual virtues that covers all the bases. I would prioritize different virtues, in different domains.

But the idea of an intellectual virtue is very important, and the idea of modeling intellectual virtues is very important.

And that’s my second recommendation. Role-model intellectual virtues. As a parent you should be thinking in terms of role-modeling character traits that have an attitude component and a behavioral component, and role-modeling behaviors is just as important as role-modeling attitudes.

Recommendation 3: Depolarize Your Home

M third recommendation is about depolarizing your home environment.

We agree that excessive polarization is a bad thing, from a critical thinking standpoint. So how can we depolarize our home environment, and promote better models of communication, better models of how to talk and think about different points of view, than the ones we’re seeing on the news and on social media?

This is a bigger topic than I can cover fully here, but in terms of low-hanging fruit, the obvious place to start, again, is for parents to model a healthier set of intellectual attitudes and practices and ways of talking about different points of view.

And this will likely be a challenge for many parents. The challenges are different for different family scenarios, but my recommendations will be these same regardless, because I’m going to target the hardest case.

The hardest case is when the parents are clearly on one side of a political or cultural divide. Mom and Dad self-identify as liberal or conservative, or religious or secular, or some other political orientation. The kids know what side their parents are on, they know how their parents feel about “the other side”, and they feel some degree of pressure to align with their parents’ values.

Unfortunately, Mom and Dad, even though you feel very confident in your positions, everything we’ve learned about human nature tells us that this is the scenario where your critical judgment is most likely to be impaired, because this is when you’re most vulnerable to a host of cognitive biases that are aggravated by your strong identification with a particular cultural group.

You’ll think you understand more than you do. You’ll think your arguments are stronger and more persuasive than they are. You’ll think the other side’s arguments are weaker than they are. And in your speech and attitudes, you’re much more likely to express contempt and hostility toward the people on the other side.

Now, you may think that your positions are well-justified, because they’re the product of a long period of independent critical thinking on your part. This is where your journey as a critical thinker has led you.

Maybe so. That’s fine. But your kids can’t make that claim. If you really want to raise your kids to think critically and independently for themselves, you have to create a space that nurtures their intellectual autonomy, where they genuinely feel encouraged to explore different points of view, where they don’t feel an overwhelming pressure to conform to your views. If you care about this, that’s your job.

Now, how do you do that without being inauthentic, without betraying your own principles?

You do that by modeling the attitudes and practices of a critical thinker, and make sure that your kids see that.

That are lots of ways of doing this. Here’s a simple example.

Let’s say you’re politically on the left. You were hoping Bernie Sanders would be the Democratic candidate in the last election.

What does your bookshelf look like? Is it stacked with progressive authors?

If I scan across it will I see Bernie’s book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In? Elizabeth Warren’s book, This Fight is Our Fight? Chris Hedges’ book Unspeakable? Will I see Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn?

This is what people do. They collect works that support their orientation. And if they have any works by authors on the other side of the political spectrum, they’re few and far between.

But what if I walked into your house and I see a bookshelf where the top shelf was all left-leaning progressive authors, the next shelf down was all conservative authors, and the third shelf was all libertarian authors.

So on the same bookshelf I could pull off, say, Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton, Creating Capabilities by Martha Nussbaum, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, by Roger Scruton, and The Libertarian Mind, by David Boaz.

And let’s say that, even though I know you identify as politically on the left, you can say something about what each of these authors is trying to argue for in these books, and you enjoy talking about these issues when given the opportunity?

What would that say about you? It would say that you’re the kind of person who is interested in ideas and arguments, and not just the ones on your side. You want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the positions on all sides.

And what would that signal to your kids, growing up, even when they’re too young to understand or even care about the issues? It would signal openmindedness and intellectual curiosity. It would signal respect for different intellectual perspectives. It would signal that home is a safe space to explore different viewpoints.

That’s an example of modeling intellectual virtues that promote critical thinking values.

If you’re not a book person, there other ways of doing this. You can diversify your podcast listening, the blogs you check, the YouTube videos you watch, the people you follow on social media.

But don’t keep all of this to yourself. Your kids need to see this. They need to see that Mom and Dad think it’s not just okay, but a good thing to explore different views and learn how other people see the world. Your kids need to see that you value this.

And this also the solution to the problem of polarization and uncivil discourse. If you make a good faith effort to understand the arguments on all sides, and are careful to distinguish criticism of arguments from criticism of people, then you are no longer part of the problem. Other people may not be prepared to reciprocate, they may still react defensively, but you aren’t responsible for their reactions. The point is that you won’t be contributing to a toxic culture of discourse anymore.

So, I can quickly sum up my recommendations for depolarizing the home environment.

The basic idea is that the best way to depolarize the home environment is by modeling intellectual virtues that promote critical thinking values.

I gave two concrete examples:

One, diversify your sources, try to understand them, and invite people to talk about them. That alone can signal to your kids that home is a safe space for critical thinking.

And two, focus on arguments, and be careful to distinguish criticism of an argument from criticism of the person giving an argument. Do this yourself, and encourage it in your children.

Recommendation 4: Be Critical of Social Media

Here’s my fourth recommendation.

Earlier I talked about how social media and digital culture are creating a hostile environment for critical thinking, and young people are most vulnerable to the negative effects of this environment.

I do think that creating a home environment that nurtures critical thinking requires that we be more thoughtful about how we use social media and our smartphones, so that we’re not victimized by this technology.

So my recommendation is that parents make an effort to understand the reasons why people think there is a danger here, and talk about this with your kids.

I’m going to suggest a new book that makes a case against using the popular social media accounts — Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

It’s by Jaron Lanier, and it’s called 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Jaron Lanier is something of a Silicon Valley guru. He’s a computer scientist, a pioneer in virtual reality, but he’s also a writer and critic on internet culture and computer philosophy, and he’s an artist and composer.

He’s been an influential figure since the birth of the internet, and he’s become a very strong critic of the way that the big social media tech giants have evolved, and the revenue model they’ve used to grow their business. He himself is on the internet all the time, he loves the internet, but he doesn’t have any social media accounts, and he’s asking us to consider deleting our accounts until we fix the problem that this revenue model has created.

The book is short. I’ll just share the titles of the ten chapters that correspond to the ten arguments of the book.

Argument One: You are losing your free will.

Argument Two: Quitting social media is the most finitely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times.

Argument Three: Social media is making you into an asshole.

Argument Four: Social media is undermining truth.

Argument Five: Social media is making what you say meaningless.

Argument Six: Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

Argument Seven: Social media is making you unhappy.

Argument Eight: Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity.

Argument Nine: Social media is making politics impossible.

Argument Ten: Social media hates your soul.

You can see how this connects to the critical thinking issues I mentioned earlier.

My recommendation is that parents and teens make an effort to understand the reasoning behind these strong claims, and take the issue seriously. Be critical of social media and the effects it’s having on us.

Lanier isn’t the only one making these criticisms, there are others, and there’s a growing number of them. But I like this book very much, and I think it means something coming from a guy who is so deeply familiar with internet and tech business culture.

I still have a few social media accounts, by the way, and I’m not planning on deleting them any time soon. But I am very deliberate about my use of social media, partly because of what I’ve learned from reading people like Jaron Lanier.

Recommendation 5: Develop the Right Background Knowledge

Here’s my last recommendation, number five: work on developing the right kinds of background knowledge, for yourself and for your kids.

What do I mean by the “right kinds” of background knowledge? I mean the kinds of background knowledge that are relevant to developing critical thinking skills.

Remember how I described the core critical thing values: true beliefs, wise choices, think for yourself.

And then I talked about how the domain of critical thinking education includes everything that can either promote or inhibit the pursuit of these values.

And I distinguished between the Light Side and the Dark Side of critical thinking.

The Light side is about how we ought to reason, if we care about truth, wisdom, and thinking for ourself.

The Dark side is about how we in fact reason, and how easy it is for us to be led astray, away from the Light.

The background knowledge that is most relevant to critical thinking is this knowledge, knowledge of the Light and the Dark — how we ought to think and reason, and how we in fact think and reason.

If you’re an adult, and you’re a reader, that means that you should be building a small library of books.

You should have a couple of books on argument analysis, a couple of books on scientific reasoning, a couple of books on logical fallacies, and so on. That’s the Light Side.

And you should have a couple of books on how the brain works, on human psychology and human nature, on cognitive biases, on the science of persuasion and influence, and so on. That’s the Dark Side.

That’s the intellectual background that is most relevant for becoming a better critical thinker. The earlier that you’re exposed to this, and the more familiar you become with the basic concepts, the better.

But please note: mere exposure to these ideas isn’t enough to guarantee that you’re going to internalize these ideas and incorporate them into your thinking.

That’s about skill development. That’s about building new mental and behavioral habits.

Critical thinking has a performative dimension to it. It’s something you do, that is expressed in your speech and your actions and your relationships with others. It’s a skill that is developed through practice and repetition and feedback.

I’ve always treated background knowledge, or conceptual understanding, as simply one component of a larger inventory of skills and attitudes that cooperate to produce an independent critical thinker.

But the right kind of background knowledge is an essential component. So start building that library. Of course it can include audio books or DVDs or YouTube playlists, whatever helps to make the content accessible and digestible.

For families, I recommend that this library be open and visible to everyone, that everyone be aware of it, and be aware of the reason why you have it. It signals that you’re serious about this, that you care about critical thinking. It’s another way of modeling critical thinking values.

Now, from a practical standpoint, we all know it can be hard to get kids interested in learning what parents want them to learn, and most of these books won’t be written for young people, so for many they’ll be too hard to understand, or too dry to be interesting.

But there are lots of things you can do with these topics to make them interesting to kids of different ages.

For example, when my daughter was a teenager, she was interested in mental illness, and she was interested in the darker sides of human nature, abnormal psychology, the psychology of serial killers, and so on. Lots of kids go through phases where this is all very interesting to them.

Earlier in the year I had picked up a book by Simon Baron-Cohen, a specialist on the neuroscience of autism, that was titled Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, and it talked about similarities and differences in brain functioning between people with autism and Asperger’s, and people who are psychopathic, who don’t feel remorse or guilt. They both involve deficiencies in empathy, but in different kinds of empathy, and it talked about different regions of the brain that are responsible for these psychological traits.

I lent her the book and because it dealt with topics that interested her, and it was written for a general audience, she read the book through and was really engaged by it.

From my standpoint, that topic, the psychology of psychopaths and serial killers, was an entry point into the broader topic of understanding how the brain works, and how emotions work. That’s background knowledge relevant to critical thinking more broadly. That’s a tick in the Dark Side column.

My recommendation would be that any excuse to get your kid to do a school project or an independent study that explores some aspect of human behavior and human nature, that’ll pay off down the road.

Also, any project that gets kids thinking critically about their own experiences, like why video games are so attractive and sometimes addictive, why they feel bad if they break their SnapChat streak, why kids their age can be so mean … these are all entry points into a broader understanding of human nature and that will serve them well down the line.

But you want to take advantage of these interests when they arise. If you’re already informed yourself, you can have conversations with your kids where you share some of that information. If you’ve got a relevant book or some other resource handy, you can hook them up right away. You can help them find good resources.

This about noticing when there’s a spark of interest, and knowing how to feed that little flame so it grows and has a chance to have an impact on your kid, rather than it being ignored and fizzling out.

Wrapping Up

That completes my five recommendations. Let me just say one more thing before we wrap up.

First, in those letters that I read at the top of the show, both the mother, Machelle, and the young boy, Asher, asked about books or websites or courses that would be helpful.

What I’ve tried to do here is share my thought process for determining whether a given resource would actually be useful or not, and part of that is thinking about where someone is along a developmental spectrum — are you 12, are you 18, are you 28? — and how much background they already have, where their interests lie, and what their objectives are.

The fact is that I need to know quite a bit about a person to have any real chance of predicting whether a resource that I suggest would be a good fit for what they’re looking for.

But there is another way of thinking about this issue.

In isolation, human beings are limited and vulnerable, both physically and cognitively. In groups, human beings are remarkable. Science, for example, is an achievement of individuals working in groups, working toward shared goals, following a shared set of norms for good reasoning.

Critical thinking is no different. It’s something we do together, it’s as much a social activity an an individual activity. Critical thinking values are as much social values as individual values.

I’ve talked a lot about critical thinking in the family on this episode, but that’s just an instance of this general principle, that critical thinking is something we do in groups, in communities, and it has to be nurtured in communities.

So, the key insight is this: the best resource we have, for improving our critical thinking skills, is other people.

If you can find just one friend or family member who is interested in these issues, who wants to talk about what they’re thinking and reading and what’s going on in the world, that’s the most valuable resource you have. Because that’s how we get better at it. It’s through conversation and dialogue with people who share these values that we really develop as critical thinkers.

Kevin deLaplante, Ph.D.

I create learning resources for the Argument Ninja community. You can learn more about my background at this link: https://www.argumentninja.blog/bio

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