One of the most important things a person can learn is think critically.
The sooner a person learns to examine evidence in a rigorous, critical manner, the easier it is for them to avoid being taken advantage of by crooks and charlatans. Most critical thinking strategies are Socratic and teacher-centric. It's your job to coax new thoughts from your students and demonstrate new ways to apply true reason.
Occam's Razor
Slice through the least-likely possibilities in any given situation with Occam's Razor. This is a technique that, according to The Skeptic's Dictionary, utilizes the "principle of parsimony. These days it is usually interpreted to mean something like 'the simpler the explanation, the better.'"
To teach this principle, introduce an age-appropriate problem to your students. For example, tell your first graders that you can't find your dog. Have them play detective, working out what likely happened, and how the situation can be most logically resolved.
Intellectual Curiosity
Help to develop a person's innate curiosity to figure out the truth. When a person stops asking "why?," he is stepping away from critical thinking. Even simple things should not be accepted on faith, as they could still be wrong.
Instill respect for credible sources and reliable information. Critical thinking means that a person must think critically about the sources he or she uses.
Teaching this can be accomplished by demonstrating the value of credible sources. If you're in a computer classroom, have students perform a simple Internet search for a topic relevant to your class. Most students will likely bring up crowd-sourced material that has not been peer-reviewed or edited. That's when you bring out a textbook or scholarly journal to demonstrate the difference in quality of information.
Fallacies
Define common fallacies for your students so they can recognize them in the arguments of other people.
The Planetary Society isolates some of these. An "ad hominem" argument is one that attacks the person making the argument, and not the actual reasoning behind his or her position. An "argument from authority" shuts down critical thought by invoking the supremacy of someone who may or may not be right. A "straw man" argument is one in which a person so stereotypes the position of the opposition that it's easy to knock down the stereotype, if not the actual opinion. When someone uses such an argument against your student, she will be able to get the discussion back on track by identifying the fallacy.
Teach this in your class by actually using these fallacies. Tell high school students that Leonardo da Vinci, in spite of the amazing technical and anatomical drawings he did, wasn't very smart because he was never married. Students will note that your criticism is full of flawed thinking. First, as relationship status doesn't relate to a person's intelligence, it is a red herring. Second, it is a kind of ad hominem argument, a simplistic attack on da Vinci.
Tags: your students, credible sources, hominem argument, Occam Razor, think critically
