As an organization, critical thinking is at the core of what we do, from essays and lists to models and teacher training. (You can check out What It Means To Think Critically for a wordier survey of the intent of critical thinking.)
For this post, we’ve gathered various critical thinking resources. As you’ll notice, conversation is a fundamental part of critical thinking, if for no other reason than the ability to identify a line of reasoning, analyze, evaluate, and respond to it accurately and thoughtfully is among the most common opportunities for critical thinking for students in everyday life. Who is saying what? What’s valid and what’s not? How should I respond?
This varied and purposely broad collection includes resources for teaching critical thinking, from books and videos to graphics and models, rubrics and taxonomies to presentations and debate communities. Take a look, and let us know in the comments which you found the most–or least–useful.
3. It’s difficult to create a collection of critical thinking resources without talking about failures in thinking, so here’s A Logical Fallacies Primer in PowerPoint format.
7. An Intro To Critical Thinking, a 10-minute video from wireless philosophy that takes given premises, and walks the viewer through valid and erroneous conclusions
There are so many components to a killer website design. But all too often I see people overlook minor details, like typography.
I know what some of you might be thinking. How important can a website’s font really be?
Believe it or not, something as simple as choosing the right font can have a major impact on conversion. Plus, website fonts affect the overall appearance of your site.
Now it’s unlikely that you’ve been on a website and thought, “Wow! I absolutely love this font!”
This just isn’t something that our minds are trained to look for and I’m not expecting you to find a font that’s going to “wow” your website visitors. But, I can guarantee that you’ve been on websites that have fonts that were generic, unappealing, difficult to read, or felt out of place. You obviously don’t want people to have that impression of your website.
Why your website font matters
Here’s something to consider: different website fonts can change the reader’s perception of a particular topic.
Errol Morris conducted a survey in an article published in The New York Times in 2012. He included a passage from a book that claimed we live in an ear of unprecedented safety, and followed the passage up with two questions:
Is the claim true? (yes or no)
How confident are you with the answer? (slightly, moderately, very)
As it turns out, Morris didn’t care about anyone’s opinion. He just wanted to know if the font could influence their answers. Forty thousand people unknowingly participated in this experiment. While everyone read the same passage; they did not all see it in the same typography.
Check out these results.
This graph shows all of the respondents who agreed to the first question. Morris took their levels of confidence in the second question and assigned a weighted value to each response.
In doing so, it’s clear that there was a difference between how confident people were in agreeing with the claims being made based on the font they were presented in. Now let’s look and see the results of respondents who disagreed with the passage.
Compare the two graphs. Do you notice any similarities?
As you can see, the Baskerville font was ranked highest for weighted agreement and lowest for weighted disagreement. Comic Sans font ranked lowest for weighted agreement, and ranked high for weighted disagreement.
Based on this data, Morris was able to conclude that fonts can influence the way people perceive information. Basically, the typeface can actually affect the credibility of your website.
In short — yes, website fonts matter.
The best Google Font pairings for 2019
You don’t want to have the same font everywhere on your site; that’s too boring. Mix it up! But make sure you pick fonts that go well together. I created this guide to help you do just that.
Leadership comes with hard work but successful leadership entails more than just laboriousness, it calls for special traits that only a select few possess. Whether these traits are skills that can be developed or are a matter of biological endowment is something which still needs scientific back-up. Generally speaking, successful leaders do have something in common. They share a set of common characteristics such as : confidence, focus, trust, far-sightedness, accountability, enthusiasm, persistence, communication, determination, love of their work, and patience. Also, successful leaders are a joy to be around. They listen empathically and are a source of inspiration and zeal to the people around them.
The TED list below features some really wonderful talks on how to be a leader and how to inspire others to action.
Take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs a single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could. — John Taylor Gatto
(Note: Rather than put everything in quotes, I’d prefer to make this article more readable by keeping John’s words in normal text. I have shortened and condensed John’s speech for quick reading but these are his ideas and words. I’m the beneficiary of John’s wisdom and experience while making them more accessible to other homeschooling parents who may be on the same path.)
16 Things Parents of Expensive Boarding Schools Want for their Children’s Education
Now let’s take a look at what the parents at the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent.
The schools have had an enormous effect on 20th century Society through the efforts of their graduates. Because of that importance, I’ve reduced the practices in these places to a formula so that you can see clearly that there’s nothing they do that isn’t easily within your reach. The formula looks like this in an elite boarding school.
But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or St. Paul’s could.
Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So the manors would be reflexive. That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person.
The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down.
Elite private school parents want their children to be advised only by people that they personally respect and Trust.
The next thing elite private school parents want is that their children be taught love and appreciation for the land, for the natural world of plants and animals, not for the scientific knowledge but because they recognize that unless you have a relation with nature, that’s easy your life becomes lonely and barren and abstract. That’s why these rich kids ride horses and sailboats. Not for the competitive sports aspect of it, because it puts them in touch with nature.
Next, they want their children to develop a public sense of decorum so that they can adapt naturally to every setting they find themselves in without provoking anger or opposition.
They want a common core of Western culture taught, not so they can pass tests, but so that all the generations the grandparents the parents and the children are certain to be comfortable with a shared set of ideas and tastes and values.
Elite boarding school parents want leadership exercises taught to their children. That’s an important ongoing theme of curriculum. They are not interested in their children being part of a managed herd.
A major concern of boarding school parents is that their children get individual attention.Their children are in small classes. By small, I mean nine or less.
They want continuous pressure put on their children to stretch their individual limits. That is, if you find four or five talents emerging, you don’t allow the kid to be satisfied with minimal performance.
There’s an emphasis in elite schools on hands-on, face-to-face experience. You never go to a book if you can go to the person who wrote the book or someone close to that person. You get as close to the origin and the idea as possible.
There’s an emphasis on writing. Homeschoolers read well but they don’t necessarily write so well. 300 words is good enough for a lot of uses. But if you can write a thousand words you can hold your own in any sort of debate, you can write op-ed pieces for the newspaper …it isn’t very hard to do.
They want kids at elite schools to develop the power of accurate observation. They don’t have to be Picasso or Rembrandt. They have to accurately transcribe what they’re able to see. The reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is.
Have experience with the master creations of music, of painting, of sculptor, of architecture, dance, poetry, the other arts. And have a familiarity with folk art as well.
Scientific knowledge of the sky above and the earth below.
Practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from, it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England.
The development of a determination to demand the highest quality performance from yourself. Even if other people say hey that was wonderful, and you know that it’s a lot less than you could have done I think you’re better off.
Conclusion
Nothing I thought was an education, and nothing that the wealthiest people in the country think is an education costs anything at all. Fifty million public school children in the United States could be reared this way. It wouldn’t cost anything.
In 2012, Richard Grove conducted and produced a 6-hour video interview with John Taylor Gatto. For those who don’t have the time to read and digest J.T. Gatto’s excellent work in book form, this interview provides an alternative. I’ve found it to be ideally listened to at double-speed! That makes it an ideal use of the next 2.5 hours of your time as John is a game-changer in the area of education.
The transcript of the interview is 41,500 words. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Tragedy and Hope and please consider supporting their work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube.
The excerpts, below, are 1/20th of the entire transcript. They are not a summary of the presentation.
RG: is Richard Grove JTG: is John Taylor Gatto
RG: Is there any connection between frustration and aggression? And what effect does schooling have on that?
JTG: Well, you answer your own question by asking it. The connection is intimate. School removes your volition in all important ways, even who you speak to. Are not they arts of association as valuable or more valuable than anything else you learn when you’re young?
Getting Into Harvard
I read how executive hiring is done and it almost never has to do with your training in whatever you’re been hired for. I’m thinking of Apple now, I believe. Is this the person we’d like to have around three years from now, bend an elbow with, or play golf with or just talk with? And that’s why you’re passed from set of executives, to set of executives. So they can sign off, yeah he’s ok, you know… We don’t tell kids that. It’s people who have the highest grade point average in the highest SAT scores. Well I spent an hour, not so long ago, within 10 years, with the admissions officer of Harvard College and, about 30 years ago an hour with the admissions director at Princeton. And let me tell you their polite dismissal of grades and SAT scores was intimidating to listen to. As if you’d have to be crazy to let somebody in.
Let me see if I can condense how you get into Harvard or Princeton. Of course, you can get into both by donating a building but how do other people get in? They are being analyzed on the basis of their ability to either become wealthy or famous. Either one will work. Fame is like wearing a billboard saying I went to Princeton. There’s that actress Jodie Foster, “I went to Princeton”. Look at where the rest of the actors and directors went, they didn’t go anywhere (laughter). But Jodie did so that’s one we hear about. The Harvard lady said, “we look for a record of excellence and what this excellence consists of.” It’s sometime in the first 18 years of your life, figuring out how to add value to the people around you. She didn’t say this in a way that catches public attention, so you might walk across the United States or bicycle the perimeter of the country or row across the Atlantic Ocean, as a physical way. You might start a little charity or set up some weather service or some pollution monitoring around Hartford. There are a substantial number, a small fraction but a substantial number, of kids doing this as we sit here. They’re writing a record of being able to add value to the community around them.
Hobbies
And then the other fellow, the Princeton guy said the same thing in different words. I asked him in 1968 roughly, asked him what part of a resume submitted to you do you look at first. The answer metaphorically caused my jaw to open. “Hobbies,” he said. I said, “I’ve been taught all my life to leave that off because it’s not germane.” He said, “on the contrary, it’s the only honest information you’re likely to get.” How did someone spend their time when it’s their free choice to spend? He said “it’s a window into their mind and their heart”.
What Kind of Hobbies?
I said what kind of hobbies? He said, “well ideally someone would have a physical hobby, an intellectual hobby and a social hobby”. That would show they are exploring these large… well, physical hobbies you mean football, baseball? Well, he said “it’s better than nothing but we would prefer not to see team sports”. I said I’d been told all my life that team sports identify your ability to work in a team. He said what happens in a team sport is if you decide to dog it, it’s very hard to tell which guy on the line has dogged it or not, or which running back has gone down quicker than he should have gone down. He said we prefer solo hobbies that involve physical danger. You mean you want kids to put their necks at risk? For example, what? He said well horseback riding is a dead giveaway. The horse weighs a half ton or more. If you do trail riding and you don’t know what you’re doing, your head gets caught on the branch and you’re the headless horseman. If the horse doesn’t like you it’ll roll over on top of you. I know immediately because the last time I rode a horse was down in Veracruz, Mexico and the horse didn’t like me and took me out on the main highway with crazed Mexican drivers going a hundred miles an hour in 18 wheelers. And it laid down on top of me. I was terrified! I could see these trucks coming. I didn’t like it and it’s the last time I rode. So he said you have to actually know what you’re doing. You can’t say is this an A job, or a B job . If you live in are intact, it is.
Then he said, “sailing a small boat”. These little 12 footers outside of land. If you don’t know what you’re doing you wind up in the middle of the Atlantic, you know. Or if wind comes up you can’t see landmarks because of the waves. I said, but those things are associated with the prosperous classes. What can somebody in ordinary circumstances do? He says well, we just let somebody in and this is probably one of the nicest factoids in my mind, in my life. We just let someone in who invented his own sport and kept records competing against himself, his past performance, his present performance. It was–get ready for this, visualize this—seat-less unicycle riding over broken terrain. If I had 10 lifetimes the plot of doing that wouldn’t occur to me. Aside from getting on a unicycle, let alone without a seat, let alone riding it over broken terrain. So they let him in because they knew he was on the fast track.
So we tell these lies and, of course, many of the people who tell the lie, believe the lie. Well surely they’re going to take valedictorians. Well, last year Harvard turned down eight out of every ten valedictorians who applied. And the two they took in, they didn’t take in because they were valedictorians. So by removing this component from the student imaginations y, u can control to some extent who even applies to Harvard and then who gets in. Because they don’t know what they’re doing. What’s the IT… “garbage in garbage out”.
Standardized Tests Don’t Matter
The evidence that all of us know standardized tests don’t measure what they claim they measure is that nobody, I mean nobody, that you encounter on the upper reaches of society would dream of hiring somebody on the basis of those tests or grade point averages. You’d be playing Russian roulette because they measure nothing. The grades largely measure that you memorize what you are told to memorize. I mean, there are a few other things but that’s the heart of it. So now you know you have somebody who’s obedient, and probably for a clerk that is a good measure. Not for someone who has to adapt to changing circumstances, you know, by the natural selection process of reality.
Schooled to the Point of Extinction
It’s fairly easy without being a wise guy or very learned as long as you retained the ability to think independently from the data in front of you, to penetrate the masks, the contentions that don’t conform to everyday reality. So no one will hire you as a CEO and ask you what your… but if you examine the data that’s available about big-time politicians. Now we have, and I don’t think it would surprise anybody, that George Bush, the most recent one was a C average high school/prep school and a C average at Yale. What does surprise people is that the candidate he ran against was a C average in prep school, in the C average at Yale, and the lower C average than George Bush. Kerry of Massachusetts. The best evidence that the nation has been schooled to the point of extinction is that they were fraternity brothers at Yale and I’ll skip its interesting reputation; it only has 15 members. And they were fraternity brothers at Yale. There’s 308 million of us! I mean, mathematically I wouldn’t know how to set the odds but they would be stupendous. No one mentioned it, or if they did it was to quickly get over that. That should have been headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. “Fraternity Brothers at Yale Run for President!”
John gives his ideas on how education should be framed and what he thinks makes for an educated person. He also details the characteristics of both an Amish education and that of the best boarding schools in the country.
I’ve read most of John’s books and this speech is the best framing of what it means to be truly educated. For parents who want to get started homeschooling their children, this is the perfect place to start.
The transcript is ~11,000 words with the video running 1 hour, 17 minutes. The excerpts, below, are 1/10 of the whole transcript.
(Note: All text, below, is John Taylor Gatto speaking)
Challenge Assumptions
One of the universal marks of an educated man or woman is that they know how to challenge assumptions. They don’t believe everything strangers tell them.
10 Kinds of Awareness to Build On
In the beginning of planning a curriculum, I think you need to consider ten separate kinds of awareness around which self-knowledge and self-awareness are built. The first is a personal reality.
We all need to know as much as we can about our relatives and our ancestors. What were their cultures? What are their cultures? What’re their situations, their goals, their struggles? Then, you need to inventory, by carefully testing your own talents and weaknesses, your own limits that come from your biological and cultural heritage. You just need to get a kind of profile yourself. it doesn’t happen in a week or a month; it’s an ongoing thing. I probably spend a little bit of time every day, at an advanced age thinking, about every single one of my relatives and wondering what part of me I can feel in harmony with that particular person.
Then, you need to have an intimate knowledge of history. I think you need to know local history, regional history, national history, and global history. Starting about 1917, the teaching of history in the United States was systematically and deliberately destroyed so that you wouldn’t be able to step back from your own life and figure out what on earth is going on.
On the other hand, I have some good news for you. It’s a fairly easy and greatly satisfying thing to self-correct that. So, an intimate knowledge of history that would include political history, and cultural history, maybe the history of labor, the history of science and technology, and other relevant forms, that’s the second thing.
The Amish Example
The Amish are a group of 150,000 well-mannered, prosperous, law-abiding people who came to America with little more than the clothes on their back. So they didn’t have any contacts to make the way easy for them and they have been persecuted by the state of Pennsylvania, the state of Wisconsin, the state of Ohio for the whole century.
So everybody’s heard about the Amish, but very few people know the astonishing details, and here they are. Virtually every adult Amish-er has an independent livelihood as the owner of a farm or a business.
The Amish realized that new government schools were social separators built on the principle of mechanical milk separators. They whirl a young mind about until both the social structure of the parents and their coherent consciousness are fragmented. Schools separate children from their personal past and from the past of the culture.
Education, as the government called it, separated people from the daily content of life dividing the world into disciplines, courses, classes, grades and teachers who remain strangers to their children in all but name. Even religion in a government school, if it was mentioned, would be studied analyzed and separated from the family and from daily life. It would become just another subject for critical analysis. Specialists armed with books, separated from the Amish and culture and training, would be entrusted with rearing their children and would encourage their children to liberate themselves from the shackles of home. For what purpose? To jump where? In what direction? of course the school, after it breaks your kids away from you, has no idea.
Boarding School Model
Now let’s take a look at what the parents of the finest and most expensive private boarding schools in America want from schooling.
I’ve been studying their expectations for 20 years, now, in order to compare them with my own goals. And I think you’ll find this interesting even if you don’t agree with all of it. I’m talking about the twenty ritziest private boarding schools in America. Schools like Groton, and St. Paul’s, and Deerfield, and Kent. There are only 20 of them, and some of them say there aren’t 20, there are only 18.
But, I’m going to warn you in advance to take careful notice that none of the principles these wealthy parents seek costs the single penny to develop. I don’t think they know that. That everybody could do one or all of these things with their own kids just as well as Exeter or st. Paul’s could. And I’m going to give you these ideas in no particular order of importance. You decide which of these are important.
Elite private schools want their children to learn good manners and to display those manners to everybody, even the humblest person, without thinking about it. So their manners would be reflexive.
That’s because they know that manners will make their children welcome everywhere, even in strange settings where they’re not known, someone will recognize that this is a well-bred person. Now tell me, does it cost anything at all to teach people good manners? I run into ghetto kids who are as mannerly as anybody on earth.
Undiluted Hard Knowledge
The second thing elite private school parents want is hard intellectual knowledge taught to their children, undiluted; they don’t want it watered down. I never taught any kids younger than 8th graders. But I will tell you that we started in eighth grade with Moby Dick, and as soon as I found out that the school edition had all the hard words and ideas taken out, I just threw it away and went out and bought enough copies for my kids and myself with a real thing. I mean Moby Dick’s is as hard a book to read as I think exists. This is your tough book to read. And what I found was after an initial struggle, maybe it lasted two weeks, the truth is that the dumbest kid and the brightest kid were thrilled with all these ideas interacting with each other and they could see the difference between the plotline of hunting a whale and all the ideas that spun out of the interaction of the crew and the officers and the captain with each other. I mean, it was a thrilling thing to do and I the truth is by that time I had lived in New York for a while, I was tremendously bored with what they handed me to teach.
If you pick up a bestseller from 1818, that would be James Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans, and you make sure that it’s unexpurgated, you will find yourself struggling to read a book that’s casting off political and scientific and philosophical ideas. I mean you got to read about three pages before the arrow gets out of the quiver. That was a best-seller in 1818. It sold the equivalent of five million copies a book today. It would be an outrageous best seller. It was bought by dirt farmers, and it was read by their kids.
Learn to Draw
Not one of my favorite human beings but the reason Charles Darwin’s book made such an enormous impact was Darwin drew; there are thousands of drawings in the book. And they’re not Rembrandt, but they’re accurate enough that you can see what the thing is. So, developing the powers of accurate observation, it’s not a natural thing to do. We don’t naturally see what’s in front of us or hear what other people say, either. So, some emphasis on that.
Learn How to Handle Pain
This one is a big one: practice in learning how to handle pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and intellectual pain. If you wonder where the tremendous American interest in sports came from it comes from the aristocratic boarding schools of England that it was translated over here it was done not to win a game but to get people familiar with the idea that pain isn’t very painful, unless you think it is. Otherwise, it just goes away.
What you learn from these things is that you do have, I’ll say the God-given internal resources, but these people knew that you had the internal resources to overcome these things, that it was only to the common people that they seemed impossible to do. Once you tried to do them, they were easy to do, or fairly easy as long as you were disciplined. As long as you understood there was danger, as long as you are confident in yourself. Well, you want those things for your children, anyway.
Homeschooling Hope
I’d say, just to swell your heads here, I think that the homeschoolers are the most exciting contradiction of the direction of the 20th century that I’ve ever heard, seen, or read about. That without the slightest bit of assistance you just grab your bootstraps and lifted yourself up and now that you’re you’re substantial enough all over that you can’t be pushed around so easily.
