Over the course of college, students are encouraged to take classes that challenge their way of thinking. The importance of doing this is to grasp a better understand of your own values and beliefs while being able to gain knowledge of others. I personally enjoy this idea and thus I signed up for a critical thinking class as I wanted to see if my beliefs and values are reasonable, or at least rational. If you’re a frequent reader of my articles you’re probably assuming that I am going to inform you on how worthless the class is, but you’d be wrong (shocker I know). I actually came to the conclusion that a critical thinking class is a useful class and I recommended that every student take it.
Critical thinking, in a more fourth grade definition, is thinking critically—but that doesn’t really paint an accurate picture of what it is to be a critical thinker. Coming to a judgment by analyzing and evaluating a situation is the essence of critical thinking. All throughout high school, it was a common ‘buzz word’ that we always needed to improve our critical thinking skills, but most of the classes didn't even focus on thinking critically. So thus, most students either develop critical thinking skills from outside high school or simply don’t learn. That’s one of the main reasons taking a critical thinking class in college can be helpful, as it provides ‘mind’ exercises.
Many of the problems facing the world currently could be solved through a critical thinking process. For example, a large portion of the world subscribers to only a select few major religions. While there are many differences in denominations and sects, people still have essentially many of the same fundamental beliefs. The problem is, if you ask a religions person why they hold some beliefs or values to be true, they will often end up using circular logic: "I know A is true because B, and I know B is true because of A."
In most instances a person has not thought critically about their religion but has followed a more ‘go with the flow’ aspect. Being raised a certain religion is fine but never questioning your beliefs can be detrimental to society. This is extremely harmful when disputes and wars between countries are often fueled by religious views when the root cause can be settled through thinking critically.
Politics follows a similar nature for most people. A Gallup poll results shows that “while a fifth of U.S. teens (21%) say they are "more liberal" than their parents and 7% say "more conservative," 7 in 10 teens (71%) say their social and political ideology is about the same as mom and dad's," suggesting people often don’t apply critical thinking. While there is nothing wrong with sharing the same political beliefs as your parents, the fact that most people haven’t question their beliefs is again harmful to the world. This touches home with the upcoming presidential election. The lack of critical thinking can be viewed in many aspect of the world. For example, in many instances people will attend a certain college without a good reason or join certain clubs ‘just because.' The problem is conformity like this makes people easier to manipulate. If a large entity, like the government, knows people are easy to control they will. This can explain why gaining ‘support’ for an issue can be easy if a person knows how to get people to follow without thinking critically.
A lack of critical thinking can lead to a sheep like mentality. Personally I strive to believe as many truths as I can and applying a critical thinking approach leads to the most success. I don’t want to join a group of people ‘just because,’ as that leads to peer pressure for adults. People don’t want to be individualistic and thus they don’t apply critical thinking skills. Being misled happens to all of us but being able to change that is where critical thinking comes into places. Having a group of ten lions is always more beneficial than 100 sheep. Think critically!
