quotes

"Children are organically predisposed to be critical thinkers." bell hooks, "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom"

"Children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only. Most children are taught early on that thinking is dangerous." bell hooks, "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom"

"[Critical thinking consists] of seeing both sides of an issue, being open to new evidence that disconfirms young ideas, reasoning dispassionately, demanding that claims be backed by evidence, deducing and inferring conclusions from available facts, solving problems, and so forth." Daniel Willingham, "Critical Thinking: Why Is It So Hard to Teach?"

"Keeping an open mind is an essential requirement of critical thinking... It is far too easy to become attached to and protective of one's viewpoint, and to rule out other perspectives." bell hooks, "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom"

"So much academic training encourages teachers to assume that they must be "right" at all times. Instead, I propose that teachers must be open at all times, and we must be willing to acknowledge what we do not know." bell hooks, "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom"

"Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there." John Taylor Gatto, "Against School"