General

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Al_Gore the Idiot — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:08:26 GMT

One way to teach kids how not to think is to indoctrinate them with religion at an early age. I remember when I was six years old, my father "introduced me to God." He told me of earth's creation and heaven and hell. Then I asked my dad, "who created God?" He snapped back at me and told me to shut up.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Jeremiah Dyke — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:04:05 GMT

@ Clayton

My oldest is 4, so it will be different depending on age (I started telling stories when he turned 1, but they were more like nursery rhymes).

All my stories involve my son Sebastian (or my other son) as the main character. Sometimes he is the hero sometimes not. Over time you get a feel for the types of stories he likes-- as they will become inattentive quickly if you are boring them. In the beginning I found that I had to make them snappy from the start, for example,

“So there he was, Sebastian was next to kick in kickball, the whole game revolved around this kick…”

From here we might make him kick the winning kick but notice another boy on the other team crying and complaining. The theme might be how to loose with dignity. But I never say what the theme is; I just base the story around it.

Another story might be about how he and his friends were lost in the woods and how they learned to survive by building a fire, keeping warm and signaling for help. You can use these stories to teach them things like how not to talk to strangers or how to call 911 or even remember their address.

You can also involve your child in the story telling, like making them a general and you the captain and asking should we fire the archers first or send in the cavalry.

It doesn’t matter if you stumble in coming up with something. Just go with it and they will love it. Start out short, maybe one a night. Then it will be two, etc. Soon you can find all sorts of things to fit into stories. I love throwing in some off the wall concept like a black hole while he travels in space, I will make it really mysterious and tell him that their very secretive. He might have so many questions about black holes at the end of your story that you turn on youtube and watch a 10 min clip. Best of luck!

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Clayton — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:12:47 GMT

I may tell upwards of 10 stories a day

How??? I sometimes try to put things in allegory form for my kids but I always struggle. Are there some "quick tips" or "cheater templates" I can use to help with this?

Clayton -

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Jeremiah Dyke — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 21:47:23 GMT

Many have already alluded to the natural inquisitiveness of children and how only a public run education system could deter such natural curiosity. I will add a few comments of how I practice education with my two sons and in the classroom, but this is only my opinion…and to each their own. I will start with the classroom.

As some here may know, I teach college mathematics and run a website called Hands on Math . I truly believe that as mathematics becomes further and further separated from applications, the more trivial their answers become to students. Math, as a subject, is rooted in mans desire to answer natural phenomena. Only recently has it become void of this. In fact, even students who do relatively well in mathematics tend to still do horribly in application type problems (in my classroom, word problems tend to have less than a 40% pass rate). Why is this? Because the math education community has dismissed application problems as a benchmark for subject mastery. Even the textbooks shove word problems to the end of the practice problem sets. With this being said, my advice for helping your students develop the ability to think (in a math classroom) would be to close the gap between the trivial and the valuable math by rooting everything in an application problem. If you want to teach percentages, send your students on a classroom date and have them calculate the tip. If you want to teach area of a circle, have them calculate the blast radius of a fire cracker. I’m not promising record breaking state-test scores, but at least you won’t have to compete with boredom and you will assuredly peak their curiosity.

As for how I raise my own two boys to think, I use stories. I may tell upwards of 10 stories a day dealing with everything from escaping a volcano to how to better treat others. My boys love them, they are a great tool for their curiosity and they learn. Story telling dates back longer than written language. It is how our ancestors learned.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

s burgess — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:24:07 GMT

check out the http://www.criticalthinkeracademy.com/ its pretty easy stuff.helps to demonstrate peoples own natural bias.great introduction to logic reason.i think the kids would love the bits on back masking and conspiracies.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Walden — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 19:20:22 GMT

Children already know how to think. It's in the process of school socialization that they develop the reflexive authority based view of truth.

It's perfectly obvious that the validity of a statement should be held on its own merit as this is demonstrated in the course of living, first through normal life experience and through the relationship with the family. It is biologically valuable for authority to be there in a child's early years, but children instinctively seek agency as they are able.

It is only the recent invention of the schoolmaster-student dynamic that the wires of fear and thought, and therewith survival, have been crossed as the urgency of life has been replaced with an artificial scaricity of autonomy in the school house.

I do not reject the value of learning logic, but it's a sorry antidote to smother kids with logic games when the faculty for genius is crushed in the process. Trying to noodle ones way out of the statist paradigm by making it a tad bit better is counterproductive if not outright self-destructive.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Kelvin Silva — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:05:31 GMT

You guys should see yaymath.org

the way he teaches his class actually seems like the people there want to learn math (or at least thats how i percieve it).

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

AJ — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 07:22:47 GMT

Nielsio:

Fantastic post AJ. Mind if I loosely repost on my blog?

Thanks! Sure, anything I write is freely repostable with or without attribution, edited or unedited, for profit or non, etc.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Clayton — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 07:45:06 GMT

@Physiocrat: I agree on the board games as well as the cruciality of valuing truth for its own sake as an aspect of maturity.

I want to throw in a plug for computers because I think they are the future of education. YouTube, TED, Khan Academy, enthusiast sites, tutoring software (think typing, language, etc.), puzzle games, even adventure games ... all of these exercise the "brain muscle" and really challenge the individual. Even the much-maligned point-and-shoot games can provide a vehicle for conveying good stories (can't think of any off the top of my head, but I will note that games often have plots and characters every bit as complex as a movie... Resident Evil is a good example of a game that was adapted to a movie, though I don't suppose the story conveys any message in particular besides... when you see an infected, blood-covered person lurching toward you, blow them away or GTFO!!!!

Clayton -

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Physiocrat — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:56:00 GMT

Despite some important contributions I feel you are all missing a very important point: men will only think critically if they want to (e.g. see reason too). Making students do logical fallacy hunter and general logic training will only succeed in the students percieving the "How to Think" lessons the same as all others such as History, Geography and Maths: a means to achieving a good mark so that the teachers like me and so do my parents; the far sighted ones may think they will have better future job prospects. The graduates from these lessons will know as much about logic as the graduates from history lessons know about history; they'll know enough to get a good mark but will have a superficial understanding and won't transfer these skills into the rest of their life.

Essentially people don't have a high value on truth (concieved either as correspondance or coherence). One could blame institutional schooling as having a perverse incentive structure and/or postmodernity amongst others. But if you want kids to start thinking critically you'll have to start with their interests rather than a set logic course.

As Clayton children particularly like stories, as do adults, so a way of proceeding could be to show a film or a TV episode of a programme which the kids like or you think they will. Then ask them who are the good characters (or those to whom we are to indentify with) and evil ones and what makes us see them that way. You can also ask questions of truth- how does this film see reality? For example Christopher Nolan's The Prestige sees reality as pretty much an illusion whereas David Lynch's Mulholland Drive sees it as cyclical.

Essentially you ask what does the film say is truth or falsehood, good or evil and beautiful or ugly. Obviously it's best to start asking what they liked what they didn't but its a universal rule that people love talking about subjects they like with others they deem worthy of the discussion. Basically you use stories as a way into thinking about the big questions. Once they are interested in doing this they will start thinking more critically and reading more widely. I have never had any formal logic training (which is quite evident some may say but anyway) yet I would consider myself to be able to think critically. The main reason for this I think was because my mother is and was very interested in certain subjects, particualrly archaeology and history, so being attentive to what is true and seeing the world as someone that was interesting and worthy of study was passed to me.

If the film/TV option is not possible playing board games focuses the mind. Chess has been mentioned but it would general be considered as "uncool" and boring. There are a whole host of games such as Settlers of Catan, Puerto Rico and 7 Wonders amongst others which compels players to seek out the optimal strategy and have a small luck element. It may be how many resources to purchase or produce or how many workers to alot to farming. This may not sound that fun but they really are. If you want to get inot board games www.dicetower.com is an excellent place to start. Unlike computer games most sophisticated board games require quite a bit of mental effort.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

gotlucky — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 03:03:58 GMT

limitgov:

can you give me examples of what you would actually have the students do?

keep in mind all of my students have access to a computer in front of them.

Well, I think just working with categorical syllogisms will go a long way, especially with the age of your students. Logic has progressed far beyond the syllogism, but you can do a lot with them, and they are straightforward enough. Couple that with logical fallacies and real world examples, and you're good to go. The best part is, you don't have to go ahead and try to point out a politician lying about some fact, you can just look to examples of problems with their logic. And of course it doesn't have to be politicians. It could be anyone.

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Kelvin Silva — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:51:54 GMT

If you havent already....

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Nielsio — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:35:40 GMT

Fantastic post AJ. Mind if I loosely repost on my blog?

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

h.k. — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 22:34:50 GMT

Give them a website link to Mises.org, of course. :D

Re: Teach Kids How to Think - How?

Clayton — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:05:58 GMT

Not bad.

Clayton -