Critical thinking: our ally

Life offers multiple situations where we need to apply critical thinking. Even as we think before we answer or respond to someone, we apply critical thinking. Applying Critical thinking has huge benefits for the mind and the body. It improves our decision making abilities, enhances our problem solving skills, refines research skills, enhances creativity and stimulates our curiosity. It involves logic, reasoning and creativity to understand things better.

We can apply critical thinking to every situation in our lives. One interesting example of critical thinking is Inversion. It describes that instead of thinking about how we can achieve something, we should rather think about all the ways in which we can fail. When we think about all the ways that can lead to ruin, we will be much better equipped to avoid them and focus on the ways that can actually get us to that particular place in life.

The pitfalls of unwise use or disuse of Critical thinking are aplenty. We often tend to express moral judgements on people’s action and behaviour without critically analysing the action. Our ability to think critically helps control our subjective bias; we get a deeper insight into their thought process.

 

Its relevance today

Francesco Gino said: “When our curiosity is triggered, we think more deeply and rationally about decisions and come up with more creative solutions”. The effects of Critical Thinking in our education process is more conspicuous today than ever before. Today schools are becoming more focused on students gaining critical thinking and problem-solving skills rather than memorization of facts. Moreover, students are not only expected to read and understand what they are reading, but to be critical thinkers, ask questions about possible data gaps. In fact, 21st Century educators focus on critical thinking along with Creativity, Communication and Collaboration in order to prepare students for the future.

 

 

How to bring in the change., and how not

The purpose of critical thinking, like many other things in life, is to find the most effective solutions to our problems. Here we mostly tend to believe that focussing very strongly at our problem at hand will help us find the solutions. However we find that focussing too intently does not help us arrive at the solution in most cases. Instead if we remain calm and try to be open to the problems around us and think about ways to solve them, novel ideas will come to you naturally in the form of solutions. We know ‘Necessity is the mother of Invention’. Not every invention and discovery in the world came off accidentally. Wheels were invented when man wanted to move heavy objects from one place to another and he thought of solving that problem. Thus to create new ideas we need to be open, highly observant, have a keen interest and passion in our belief and totally focused on the positive changes that we want to see.

Maintaining our calm, patience and passionate about what we wish to accomplish helps us realise our goals.

 

About the authors

The article has been contributed by the following students from Don Bosco Central School,Mannuthy: Hrithu Nandha, Jeswin Mechery, Sebha Sojan and Thamanna Julish.