Ground reality, or reality grounded?

We often speak of focusing on the goal, not the obstacle. However this makes us think of something we are not sure about rather than doing something that can be acted upon here and now. Focusing on doing hard work and giving your best will eventually lead to positive results. But this hard work and giving your best demands a quality of critical thinking. Critical thinking is taking decisions and solving your problems logically. It is a vital quality that leads you to your destination.
However this does not happen in reality. One of the many reasons is that children are tested on the basis of their memory skills rather than their moral development. Secondly, peer pressure, which makes us hasten with our decisions, rather than indulge in rational thinking.

There are more than 100 ways in which our brains make us think in rather illogical ways. We call them cognitive biases. Asking questions is a trait of an intelligent person and a critical thinker as well. Asking questions in the class helps students to separate reliable information from untrustworthy information. However, it is asking the right question that determines critical thinking. In fact, an intelligent person may have good answers but it needs a genius to have good questions.

 

Inner working of the critical mind

True working of the critical mind show some strong aberrations from the conventional thinking style. For optimum effectiveness, we have to free ourselves from all the disturbing thoughts and concentrate on something that relaxes your mind. Focus is about choosing one thought among 1000s.

Critical thinking teaches us that it is good to be wrong, the ideas we hold aren’t us and we don’t need to defend them to the death. When you can deduce information to find the most important parts and apply those to your life, you can change your situation and promote growth and overall happiness.

 

Tomorrow’s problems, today’s solutions

Critical thinking is a great solution, it will definitely help you with decision making in most important areas of your life like money , health, relationship and career but most importantly it may be seen as the next step in human evolution as you will be able to judge yourself at a better level.

Fundamentally, critical thinking is about making sure there are good reasons for one’s beliefs. One needs to evaluate arguments to determine whether they offer worthy premises that support their conclusions.

So in the spirit of critical thinking, nothing that has been said above, has to be considered as the last word that one should be obliged to agree with. We should disagree, debate , enquire and question as much as we would like to.

 

About the authors

The article has been contributed by the following students from Mahavir Senior Model School, New Delhi: Aanya Jain, Gracy Agarwal, Naman Jain, Amisha Sharma, Atishay Jain and Pratishtha Negi.