Navigating the New Age: How to Raise Critical Thinkers in a World of Disinformation

Welcome to Where Parents Talk.

My name is Leanne Castellino.

Our guest today is the CEO of Brave, Writer and a thought leader in homeschooling.

Julie Bogart is also an author and creator of an online writing program serving more than 190 countries over more than 20 years.

Her latest book is called Becoming a Critical Thinker, a workbook to help students think well in an age of disinformation.

Julie is also a mother of five, and she joins us today from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Welcome and thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Leanne, this student workbook that you've just.

Yeah, and that's geared towards parents.

This current book is a workbook for students.

Let's start, Julie, by having you describe how you define critical thinking.

I love when we start there.

Critical thinking, to me, is all about self awareness.

So in most venues, people think critical thinking is the ability to critique someone else's ideas.

But what I discovered as I spent time in education is that what's missing in most of our thinking is our own awareness of our biases when those get kicked into gear when we're triggered by an idea and are resistant to it.

In other words, we can't think well if we don't understand the source of authority that drives our own thinking.

So critical thinking, to me is the capacity to recognize your own bias as it kicks into gear to evaluate data, evidence and understand its sources of authority before you start critiquing someone else.

Once you can do that, then, yes, you can examine ideas.

It's such a great starting point.

And we're going to unpack what you just said because there's a lot in there.

But I'm curious as to why you believe raising a critical thinker with those attributes that you just described is important today.

Well, of course, we have social media and the Internet, which we all complain about constantly because we don't like this idea that our minds and our values and our beliefs are being flooded with information and disinformation, and we find it more and more difficult to sort through that.

Our kids seem to be even more ill equipped.

But what I've noticed, actually, is that in this, this current era, where we are all very aware that information we get may not be accurate, we are all starting to actually evaluate our sources of authority in a much more rigorous way.

So I think this moment is especially poised because of the rise of AI artificial intelligence, the large language models like chatgpt the capacity to sort through what we can trust and what we can't trust is a vital skill for anyone, and particularly our children who will eventually be working in jobs and having to deal with that kind of, you know, fire hose of information every day.

So much to wade through.

It's a daunting task for any of us to think about living in the knowledge age, and how do we trust what we're seeing, reading, hearing, listening to?

So where is an appropriate place for a parent to start to ultimately help their child wade through this as well?

So glad you asked that question.

When we talk about critical thinking, adults always think about politics, social issues, and religion.

But critical thinking actually starts from the time your child is born.

Most of us adopt our values through two main lenses.

We start as an individual with our own perceptions, and those drive us to act.

So from the time you're born, you're crying because you're hungry.

That is an expression of a desire.

And you aren't sifting through whether or not that's inconvenient to your mother.

You're simply expressing, this is my need, this is my perception.

But what we don't often acknowledge is that the individual perceptions that we develop over our lifetimes get modified by the communities that we're a part of.

And that is another lens for how we form our beliefs.

And those communities actually exert a force against our perception.

So, for instance, a baby wants to eat whenever it's hungry.

But the family, that first community they're a part of, is on a propaganda campaign to convince that baby that eventually you'll be eating only three times a day with a snack.

Right?

We don't just continue to only eat whenever we feel like it.

We have this logic story that we feed to our children.

That is, food comes three times a day, not 25 times a day.

And we're going to talk you into it, we're going to model it, we're going to convince you that this perception you have needs to be subordinated to this community value.

Well, in a family, some of these are so natural and so obvious.

You know, potty training, learning to dress yourself.

These all seem like they aren't propaganda, they're just good sense.

But the longer that we live and the more communities we join, those communities are interpreting that overwhelming experience of being an individual into a system that helps us feel like we belong and we know how to live and operate.

So what parents can do is avoid the temptation to constantly modify a child's perceptions.

I would like parents to be more Curious.

So here's a good example.

Let's say you've got like a seven year old child, it's time for dinner.

And you say, hey, go wash your hands, let's eat dinner.

And your child says, I don't want to wash my hands.

Most parents of my generation see that as an authority contest.

Parent will say, you have to.

I said, so this is the end of the discussion.

And so now the child is subordinating all the reasons they didn't want to wash their hands under this authority.

That's telling them they have to anyway.

In the current model of parenting, sort of this millennial and Gen X group, what a lot of them have done, instead of this authoritarian control, they've done what they call cooperation by explanation.

So what they'll do is they'll say, well, you know, science says there are germs on your hands.

You can't see them, but if you ingest them, you're going to get sick.

What they've actually done is doubled down on authority.

They've said, not only do you have to do it because I'm saying so, but now science that you've never read, haven't vetted, is also confirming that I'm right and you're wrong.

What I tell parents all the time is even though giving explanations feels like you're empowering your child, what you're really doing is training them to trust and authority, even authorities they haven't vetted.

So what I prefer is once a month, you can't do this every day.

I know you're busy.

When your child resists you or dissents, go down that rabbit hole.

Oh, you don't want to wash your hands.

Why is that?

Find out what's driving that.

It might just be they want more time on the computer and they don't want to disengage.

It might be that they think the water is too hot and you've never thought about the water being too hot or too cold.

Could you get a thermometer and test different temperatures to see which one they can tolerate?

Could you look up other ways to get rid of germs?

Like maybe with a blow dryer and heat instead of hand washing?

But what if even at the base of all this, your child just doesn't believe hand washing makes a difference?

Could you interrogate your own belief?

Maybe that child saw you in Target yesterday and the baby sister spit out a pacifier and that child watched you pick it up off a dirty floor, suck the dirt off it into your own mouth, and pop it back in that baby's mouth.

Could your child on some level see this as an empty, meaningless ritual that you yourself haven't interrogated yet?

I mean, do we wash our hands every time we eat a snack?

We don't.

So is hand washing required?

So part of what I hope parents will do is allow kids to dissent, to gather their own data and experiences, to challenge the authority of a parent's take, and for the parent to actually reframe their own understanding of that belief.

Like to actually interrogate it for a moment.

How much do I believe this?

Is this something that was just passed on to me that I've never critically examined?

So, like that.

Such an interesting perspective.

It makes complete sense the way you lay it out and explain it.

It seems rational.

But I can hear parents who watch or listen to this interview saying, I just don't think I have that kind of time.

I'd be debating every single thing that we're doing all day long.

So in other words, it's a fine balance.

So how do you as a parent strike a balance?

And can you provide an example similar to what you provided, but for the tween teen phase of life?

Because they're then designed at that point to challenge you on just about everything naturally, right, Perfect.

We'll take them one at a time.

So first of all, even at the top, I said, do this once a month with a child, right?

When they're climbing in the car seat and they're saying, I hate car seats.

You have to get somewhere.

You're going to strap them in.

They may not like it, but you might revisit that at bedtime.

You might say, you know it.

I remember that you said you didn't like car seats, and I want to know more about that.

I want to talk about this with you.

You can't do it every day for everything.

But here's what's really fascinating.

We don't do it at all.

We literally look over their heads and we insist and we get irritated when they won't cooperate and we think we've given them this friendly, nice explanation and all of it just feels like coercion.

So if once in a while you surprise your child by being curious and actually giving support or validity to their perspective, the whole dynamic starts shifting and these stop being such contests and it won't take as long the second and third time, because now they know that you are actually curious and interested and you're going to go on this journey together, you'll be amazed.

They'll come up sometimes with their own solutions, because the thing they were worried about isn't the thing you're explaining against.

Right.

So that's the first one.

Now, teens are in a slightly different category, mostly because younger kids are more naturally cooperative.

They want to please their parents.

You can insist, and they will swallow their feelings and do what the family program is.

Teens really want to find out, can I dissent?

Am I in a cult, or am I in a group of people that have the capacity to.

To think about ideas differently than I do?

I'll give you an example from my own family.

I had a son who's about 16 at the time, and there was a ballot measure in Ohio that he was really excited about, but he wasn't old enough to vote.

So he got all of this data together for me.

And just so you know, he's a human rights lawyer today, so this is very much like his personality.

And he made this case.

And I listened and I asked questions, and I was so interested, and I validated what he put together.

And at the end he said, so are you going to vote yes?

Said, actually, I'm going to vote no.

And tears sprang from his eyes.

And he said, mom, I count on you to be logical.

And I said, oh, honey, everything you said actually supports your position.

You didn't account for these three things I'm thinking about, and because you didn't ask, they didn't come up.

I don't need you to account for them right now, but what you expressed is logically coherent.

I get why you hold that view.

And my thought is, eventually your side's going to win, but right now, these are the three reasons, and do you want to account for them?

Which he couldn't because he didn't even know those reasons existed.

And naturally, this ballot measure has now passed about a decade later, so he was even in the trajectory of where it was going.

But it was a moment for me to be able to say, you're okay in my family having this completely different position than me, and I can even honor and value why that position is meaningful to you and still not hold it myself.

Agreement is not the goal.

It is the capacity to actually hold a position and not be shamed, kicked out.

I've seen families actually excommunicate children over having positions they don't agree with.

And that's the danger in the teen years, is that you actually push this parental propaganda program too far and you alienate your child instead of creating a community of thinkers.

It's interesting because building on that point, and you're talking about an example that involves society in that ballot example that you shared.

But you're seeing what you're talking about play out in real time all over the place these days.

Yes.

And it becomes such a lot of noise and louder noise as the days roll along.

So if parents and adults are struggling to parse through this and make sense of it and fact check and research and, you know, all the things that you need to do to make sure that it's the truth.

Right.

How can we then plausibly expect them to decode that for their kids?

And here's the thing.

They're going to wade into some waters that are propaganda conspiracy theories.

That same son at one point got very interested in a YouTube video that I knew was flat out conspiracy theory lunacy.

But what I found fascinating was it was the first time he had an alternative way of thinking about how the world worked.

And we want that.

We want kids to be able to challenge the status quo thinking that has been handed down to them.

That is part of becoming an educated person.

So rather than just bashing the content, I sat with him and watched it.

We talked about it.

We clicked on some of the sources.

We looked at it together.

It's really why I wrote Becoming a Critical Thinker, because I actually give you tools that you can use to sort of vet information sources, your own sort of biased thinking that kicks into gear.

And one of the first chapters in Raising Critical Thinkers and also in Becoming a Critical Thinker is called says who?

And I use the illustration of the Three Little Pigs story.

Most of you remember it.

There's a big, bad wolf.

He blows down the houses, he eats the pigs.

Everybody hates him, right?

You think of him as big and bad.

And this wolf does his own defense of why what he did was not only wrong, but has been grossly misunderstood.

Now, for parents everywhere, we all laughed at this book because it was an obvious parody, but on the flip side, for small children, and I've interviewed many millennials who remember that book, they couldn't differentiate between the sort of standard version that we all know, which we don't know if it's true, it's a fairy tale, it's fiction, but it's told from a deliberate viewpoint that makes the wolf bad.

It was their first exposure to the idea that a story can have multiple versions.

And that's really our goal with teens.

It's not to camp on any one position.

It's to imagine what I call the rhetorical imagination.

Imagine yourself into someone else's viewpoint.

How does it logically cohere?

What are the sources of data, experience and anecdote that they use for this to feel logical to them?

And for our teens in particular, they are, a lot of them, more savvy than even my boomer generation is because they are aware that information can be modified, edited and tweaked.

When I was growing up, I didn't know that was happening.

It just seemed like the nightly news was presenting the facts.

So we're in a really volatile era, but it's also one where kids are awake.

They know what's going on, they're curious about it, they want to know.

It's such an important point that you're bringing up, because the fact is, we wouldn't really be having this conversation if we weren't living in the times we're living in, with exposure to knowledge everywhere, you know, in the palm of our hands in the form of smartphones, et cetera.

So what would you say to a parent who perhaps has been a little late to the game and is really struggling with technology and really doesn't think this is important?

My kids will figure it out.

They go to a good school.

The teachers will sort it out.

What would you say to them?

That this is important for them to understand critical thinking and how to impart that on their kids?

Why?

How would you answer that?

Well, first of all, I think you have a much richer, more satisfying life if you can think well.

The solutions to our problems require us to include more viewpoints.

Our culture is polarized because we are built on what I would call the missionary model.

Everybody is an evangelist to convert people who don't want what you're offering to what you're offering.

And that model fails.

It is not an effective tool for creating movements or solutions.

Because what you're saying is, discard those things that were important to you in order to embrace what I say is important.

But if we're going to create solutions that last, we have to include everyone's viewpoint.

So I have two ideas for you.

The first one is a family one.

The second one is how to approach a social issue.

So in the family, you've got, let's say, teens who really want to be on video games all day, all night.

Right?

And then you have parents who are like, I've read the data, it's bad for you.

I'm not going to let you.

How do we solve this problem?

Do we just lean on science do we just lean on parental authority or do we just give up and let our kids do whatever they want?

I say let's get all the reasons on the table.

So when I first asked my teenager, as another son, he wanted to play video games till like three in the morning.

I thought that wasn't good on school nights.

I had a very traditional view of school.

And I asked him why?

Why can't you just be done at 11?

Can't you just play from in the afternoons and evenings?

Why until three in the morning?

I found out his favorite gaming buddy lived in Croatia and this was a time they could both be on at the same time.

That was insanely reasonable.

Then I thought, well, who is this Croatian guy?

Is he real?

Yes.

So we went down the rabbit hole to establish that he was real.

This was the time they liked playing.

Could I trust my son to evaluate whether or not his body was getting enough sleep at the time he was homeschooled.

So he's like, mom, I can just sleep in and start homeschool later.

Oh my gosh, that seems so reasonable.

But for some reason I wasn't willing to find that out.

Initially, I wanted to just put my superior information on him.

So what we ended up doing is starting school later.

He made sure that he did the schoolwork he was supposed to do.

His gaming time was later in the day and at night so he could be with his friends.

And it was a solution that met all of our needs.

I think so often we're in these zero sum, high stakes dynamics where it's my way or the highway or your way and I'll get out of the way.

But that's not really the best solution.

We struggled with video gaming and screen time the whole time.

I had five kids, one computer.

I think we went through 15 different iterations of solutions.

You have to be willing to recognize that you're not just going to problem solve one time.

So that's kind of a family solution.

But if we think about it like in the political landscape in school, you'll have like a 10th grade teacher, social studies, and they'll say, let's debate gun rights.

And then what they'll do is they'll divide the class in half and they'll say, you should be pro gun rights, you should be gun restriction.

Come up with your cases, we'll have a debate and then everyone will hear both sides.

But are there only two sides to these stories?

My thought is, in a class of 30, you would say, how many of you have parents in the military?

We Find out how many of you have parents in law enforcement.

We find out how many of you have family members who've been victims of gun violence.

We find out how many of you live in parts of the city where gun violence is common.

How many of you don't, how many of you never held a gun, never seen a gun, don't know a gun?

Right.

Stir up all of the attachments around guns, hear all of those stories before we even start talking about issues.

And then when we get to what the key criteria is for thinking about gun rights, like background checks, types of guns, ballistics, public spaces, when we start doing those, figure out how many of these viewpoints, the hunter, the law enforcement and the victim, how many of those can we account for in the solution we're offering?

That's what creates.

It's not just bipartisan, it's multi perspectival solutions.

And this is what has staying power when we think that way.

But I always say the revolution has to start in the living room because schools are still on this idea of right answers.

There's one answer.

All 30 students will arrive at it because the teacher has decided it and that has created this crisis.

I think we're in amplified of course, by the Internet and social media when.

We talk about schools because it's such an important point.

Our kids spend, you know, seven, eight, nine hours there daily.

What do you believe needs to happen when it comes to teaching critical thinking in schools?

And I asked this question because in many schools it is used as a marketing tool, as a sales tool to entice right and to entice parents to send their kids there.

But at a granular level.

What is going on in the classroom to impart critical thinking skills to these kids?

What should that look like?

Yeah, so I was interviewed not too long ago by someone who that's their mission, to bring critical thinking into schools.

But what I discovered the longer we talked, the idea was to simply keep subverting the status quo answers like to get people to think beyond, which is a good starting place.

But actually the problem, I think with most school training is that kids have been inculcated in this system that the teacher knows the right answers and their grades are dependent on those right answers.

Multiple choice testing has been proven to be very difficult for kids who come with different sets of experiences and backgrounds because of language, because of the way the teacher architects the test.

So I saw a study about Finland just the other day and they almost use no standardized testing, no multiple choice testing.

Everything is either short answer or Oral.

And the goal is for students to actually think through for themselves the answer, not guess based on four answers and then picking the one they think might be right, but actually being able to generate their own vocabulary to describe what they know.

So in schools, the first place to start, in my opinion, is with helping them understand the idea of viewpoint.

Where does viewpoint come from?

How many different ones do we have in this room?

How many different ways would there be to answer this one question?

What criteria would one person use that would be different than someone else's to come up with a meaningful answer?

And I give an example.

In my book, there was a, a multiple choice test that says, what unit of length would you use to measure this?

And there's an illustration of a tree.

The answer choices were feet, centimeters, kilometers and quarts.

And the right answer was supposedly feet, because the teacher had in mind that the student would imagine a tree in a forest that was tall.

But one of her students, a friend of mine, it was her son, he selected centimeters because he was measuring the illustration on the page.

And it all it said was this.

And there's the illustration.

So now what are we asking students to do?

To guess their way into the imagination of the adult or to be able to defend the answer that made sense and is logical and by the way, is even accurate.

It is a unit of length.

Centimeters could be used even for a tall tree.

They're both units of length.

Those are the kinds of things that we want to help our kids start to notice that when we come to any subject area, it's multifaceted.

It is not just a list of correct answers.

So along those lines, then, what trends, if any, are you observing that give you pause that concern you when it comes to critical thinking and how that's being taught in the world, whether it's at home, in the school or elsewhere?

So some critical thinking courses are actually designed to be apologetics.

So there's a difference between thinking well and apologetics.

Apologetics is where you start with a premise.

This is what I believe is true.

Now I'm going to go find all the supporting information to prove it's true.

But critical thinking doesn't start with a conclusion.

It starts with a question.

I want to know more about.

I don't know enough about this.

So is climate change real?

Might be a question, as opposed to climate change is real.

Here's all the data.

Or climate change isn't real.

Here's all the data.

And we do this all the time.

It's very common in religion to have apologetics But I see it across the board.

We don't start with curiosity.

We typically start with an assertion and then we go and find research for it.

So for high school, I think one of the most valuable essay formats that never gets taught is the exploratory essay which we teach in our school, in our online classes.

And the reason for that is we want to teach kids how to do the research, read the research and think about the research, not just hunt and peck through the research for the data and the facts that will support the thesis that they felt required to generate before they know anything about the topic.

Really interesting.

When you look at it through that lens, it's a completely different mission and, and a different outcome.

Certainly.

Julie, you chose to homeschool all five of your children starting back in the early 80s when it was not something that people even had probably heard about for the most part.

I'm curious as to why you chose to to homeschool your kids and if the homeschooling has had an impact on their critical thinking skills across their their lives.

Wow, great question.

So first I just want to say my kids started being born in 87, so I'm a 90s homeschooler.

And here's what I know at the time.

I was raised in Los Angeles and I was in a school district that ironically was in Malibu Canyon.

So I had hippies, I had ex Peace Corps volunteers, first generation, right.

And they were very experimental in their methods.

But the thing that I really cherished about my education is that I felt like it was in my body.

It wasn't just a bunch of information that I had actively participated in co creating it and that what I learned was still with me today.

And as I went off to college at ucla, I ended up being a teaching assistant in a school in Brentwood that was a busing school for desegregation.

And what I saw in that school really worried me.

It was first of all not a successful desegregating project.

You know, Louisiana's come a long way since then.

But it was also very outcome based.

And there was this loss of sort of creativity and personal meaning making that seems so important to me.

So when I started reading about homeschooling in the 80s, I was drawn to it.

I thought, oh, maybe I can protect and preserve what I had in school through homeschooling, which is really backwards.

You don't hear that very often.

And part of what was joyful about homeschooling was reading aloud to my kids.

So I had the opportunity to select a wide variety of books.

And it was their provocative questions that drove so much of what we learned, because they would ask me things I didn't know the answers to, and we would have to all go on this project together.

By the time they were in high school, some of my cherished beliefs that I had been very full of effort, trying to inculcate into them, completely crashed and burned because they were resistant.

And I famously tell in my other book, the Brave Learner, a story of how I tried to restrict and regulate my oldest son's listening to music habits, what books he would read.

And it resulted in a massive, terrible parenting moment between my husband, me, and my son.

And it was in that moment that I really had to pivot and realize I don't have control over this mind.

I got to get curious about this mind.

He's listening to Rage against the Machine for a reason.

Let's look at the lyrics.

My own mother, who was his grandmother, was more curious about the music he was listening to than I was, because she had learned that the way you grow a healthy person is to know about their interiors, not to drive all that underground, but to be in connection.

So that was really the beginning for me.

And I would say that my five kids are amazing thinkers.

I've learned so much from them.

They all have, you know, developed their own professions and traveled the world and speak different languages and, yeah, I'm humbled by them every day.

What a wonderful story.

Julie, let me ask you, what was the impetus for writing Raising Critical Thinkers and then this workbook and also, what do you want readers to take away from, from these pieces?

Thank you.

So Raising Critical Thinkers has been like a 30 year project for me.

I didn't know when I started, but I hopped online in my mid-30s, joined this homeschool discussion board with all this, you know, married, white, religiously similar, politically similar women.

And we found ourselves in online blood baths over who was destroying the planet faster.

Parents with pampers or parents with cloth diaper services.

We argued about VBACs and breastfeeding.

We talked about our political perspectives and our religious doctrines, and no one agreed.

I mean, we were nice to each other sometimes, but sometimes it was a full on troll war.

And I started not asking the question, who was right?

I was wondering, why do we all think we're right?

Why does each person think, I can make an assertion, grab my source of authority, and everyone will fall in line?

And what I started realizing is that's the Training from school.

And the more I looked at the way school treats us that way, the more I saw that Internet was going to go down this horrible direction.

Because it's obvious to me that we all believe that all we have to do is cite one source of authority and everyone will agree.

But we don't all share the same sources of authority.

So I started being curious about how do we grow those skills, not only in our children, but for ourselves?

And then how do we live in a different way with each other?

Online, I have an online community with my company called Brave Learner Home.

And we've never had an argument over anything political, no social issue.

And everyone from all perspectives is welcome because we come with this other way of addressing the world.

We're not there in conversion mindset.

So it's a big change.

And I wrote this book because parents often think they're good critical thinkers.

In fact, almost every radio show I've ever been on, especially the ones run by men, they always think I'm of the same political persuasion as them.

And they're like, thank God you wrote this book for those other people.

And my hope is that we'll all discover how far we have to go.

When I'm reading Facebook, I'm like everyone else.

I suddenly feel smug, annoyed.

I think I'm superior to people.

This is just the human condition.

But now those are my critical thinking tells.

I know.

Oh, I'm not thinking well in this moment.

I'm just defaulting to groupthink, to my team, to cheerleading my ideas.

Critical thinking requires that pause.

So I wrote Raising Critical Thinkers to help parents get good at it.

There are activities they can do with their kids, ages 5 to 18.

So that's in here, too.

And then my publisher said, what about.

Excuse me, my publisher said, what about teenagers?

Could you write something for them?

So we came up with, it's more like a journal, sort of like the artist's way, you know, but it's a workbook for them to have the privacy to think about their own thinking, to not have to always do that in public, to examine a view without someone telling them they're wrong.

Certainly such an important area of discussion, of practice, of awareness.

As you mentioned at the outset, given the global world we live in, given the knowledge that we're all exposed to.

Julie Bogart, thank you so much for taking time to share your insight with us today.

Thank you for having me.