Critical Thinking - Philosophy

DEVELOP CONFIDENCE IN YOUR ABILITY TO REASON AND FIGURE THINGS OUT No matter how well or poorly you have performed in school or in college, it is important to realize that the power of the human mind, the power of your mind, is virtually unlimited. But, if any of us are to reach our potential, we must take command of the workings of our minds. No matter where we are as thinkers, we can always improve. As young children going through school, we usually get the impression that those students who are the quickest to answer questions, the quickest to turn in their papers, the quickest to finish tests are the "smartest" students. Those students who fall into this category often define themselves as "smart" and, therefore, as better than other students. They consequently often become intellectually arrogant. On the contrary, those students who struggle often see themselves as inferior, as incapable. And these students often give up on learning. They don't see that the race is to the tortoise, not the hare. The fact is that standard measures of intelligence often impede learning. The point is that, whatever you have learned or mislearned about what it means to learn, you can now begin in earnest to develop your own mind, to take command of it. Critical thinking provides the tools for you to do just that, and it levels the playing field for all students. Some of the world's best thinkers—thinkers such as Einstein, Darwin, and Newton—are not the quickest thinkers. The best thinkers may be those who plod along, who ask questions, who pursue important ideas, who put things together in their minds, who figure things out for themselves, who create connections among important ideas. They are people who believe in the power of their own minds. They are people who appreciate the struggle inherent in substantive learning and thinking. Consider how Darwin (F. Darwin, 1958) articulated his own struggles with learning: I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time, but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence, and thus I have been led to see errors in reasoning and in my own observations or those of others. In pursuing intellectual questions, Darwin (1958) relied upon perseverance and continual reflection rather than on memory and quick reflexes. I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit... My power to follow a long and purely abstract train of thought is very limited... My memory is extensive, yet hazy... So poor in one sense is my memory, that I have never been able to remember for more than a few days a single date or line of poetry... I have a fair share of invention, but not, I believe, in any higher degree... I think that I am superior to the common run of man in noticing things which easily escape attention, and in observing them carefully... 1 have had the patience to reflect or ponder for any number of years over any unexplained problem, Einstein (Clark, 1984), for his part, performed so poorly in school that when his father asked his son's headmaster what profession his son should adopt, the answer was simply, "It doesn't matter, he'll never make a success of anything." He showed to signs of being a genius and, as an adult, denied that his mind was extraordinary: I have no particular talent. I am merely extremely inquisitive”.