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Letter from the President, December 13, 2017


Dear Critical Thinking Colleagues:
 
We are diligently working, like Santa's elves, on the details of our 38th Annual International Conference on Critical Thinking. We hope you will make your plans now to join us, as remember, this conference is for YOU!
 
At this conference, we introduce Plenary Sessions, which all participants are invited and encouraged to attend. Each session is designed to be highly enriching for all who join us. All will be led by myself and Senior Fellow, Dr. Gerald Nosich:

  • Gerald Nosich leading a session at the 35th Annual International Conference.
    Critical Thinking Standards for Assessing Thinking in All Fields of Study and Professions... Dr. Gerald Nosich
  • Emancipating the Mind: Why 'Group Think' Is Such a Problem in the Professions, in Teaching and Learning, and Throughout Human Societies... Dr. Linda Elder
  • Testing Our Students into Boredom: Calling for a Revolutionary, yet Classic, Approach to Assessment at All Levels Through Foundational Intellectual Tools... Dr. Linda Elder
  • Teaching Students to Ask Essential Questions... Dr. Gerald Nosich
  • Thinking Conceptually as Well as Scientifically: Which Takes Precedence and Why? Going Beyond Superficial Approaches to Both... Dr. Linda Elder
These sessions represent only a small portion of what is to come at the conference; we look forward to seeing many of you there! REGISTER EARLY for special early-bird rates.
 
Linda Elder conducting a session at the 2013 Spring Workshop on Critical Thinking.
With a rich, almost 40-year history, we are able to continually circle back to our previous writings and experiences, to learn from our past, and to see how we fare in terms of our progress historically. Many of you will be interested to know that in 1991, Dr. Richard Paul formulated essential guidelines for establishing an educational or civic program with critical thinking at its foundations. See an image of these guidelines under my signature below; though they were outlined in the context of formal education, one can see how many of them, with slight modification, apply as well to other types of organizations: businesses, non-profits, governments, and so forth.
 
Now, 26 years later, how many schools, colleges, and other organizations across the world actually - and with evidence - embrace sound principles such as those Paul articulated so many years ago? How would you rate your institution? We can design a customized plan for you that incorporates these essential components of an effective staff-development program in critical thinking. Contact Ms. Rachael Collins, Executive Assistant to the President, to set up a telephone or online meeting with one of our Fellows to discuss professional development possibilities. Also remember to email us your stories, so we can help you celebrate your professional development victories in critical thinking.
 
As the winter holidays draw near, we ask again that you remember us in your year-end giving plans. The Foundation for Critical Thinking is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that relies on charitable contributions to continue its work, much
Some of the gifts available to charitable contributors.
of which is done without compensation. Under my signature, beneath the image of Richard Paul's 'Seventeen Underpinnings,' you will find a copy of a plea for help we received just last week from a part of Pakistan that has been devastated by flooding. It was our pleasure to donate books to the author's cause, but this is only one small example of the innumerable free resources we send out each year, which is why your contributions are essential to our ongoing work.
 
(Remember: all donations to the Foundation for Critical Thinking are tax-deductible, and the gifts we offer make excellent holiday presents for loved ones.)
 
I leave you this week with a Martin Luther King, Jr. quote from his 1968 speech, 'I've Been to the Mountaintop':
 
And another reason I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them.
 
Though this quote referred specifically to war and peace (which King went on to frame as a choice between 'nonviolence or nonexistance' in light of nuclear weapons), it applies as well to other colossal, and interrelated, challenges of our own time: environmental calamity, overpopulation, justice throughout human societies, and so on. We cannot lose sight of these challenges, which demand not only our attention, as Dr. King reminded us, but the finest thinking we can muster. It falls on our generations to solve the pressing problems now facing us as humans; we are out of time to defer it to another.
 
I thank you, as always, for your commitment to fairminded critical thinking and just critical societies.
 
Sincerely,
Dr. Linda Elder
Educational Psychologist
President and Senior Fellow
     
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An image of Richard Paul's 'Seventeen Underpinnings of Critical Thinking Staff Development':
 
 
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Copy of a message from the Mother of Civilization Library in Pakistan:
 
Honorable Ma'am
 
With profound regards we humbly request you that We are a voluntary organization which sets up work in Indus Valley Sindh, the southern part of Pakistan our project is to help and facilitate a libraries program in Sindh, with the name of "Mother of Civilization Library" We therefore anxious in collecting resource materials including any books of Dr. Linda Elder an internationally well-known an educational psychologist and prominent authority on critical thinking.
 
Here is a large part of school, college, and university aged population in Sindh towns and countryside, who love to read and know more about her work specially her books," The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking-Concepts and Tools, Miniature Guide to Understanding the Foundation of Ethical Reasoning, Critical Thinking, Thinker's Guide to Analytic Thinking, Thinker's Guide to Fallacies, The Aspiring Thinker's, and Thinkers AT Asking Essential Questions, " as we are unable to purchase books due to lack of resources and fundamental facilities of libraries, and became very much in troubled after big catastrophe of supper flood which hit the large part of population of this province in which all educational institutions and libraries infrastructure has been destroyed.
 
Your donations of books can do much to stimulate and encourage the growth of learning, especially among the young generation of Sindh about it. Therefore we appeal your great institution to make a little contribution of above books on compassionate and humanitarian ground; the result would be the placement of new or used books (or equivalent educational materials) into the library for needy and destitute Students.
 
Hope you will consider our humble supplication with the glance of appreciation and make small numbers of books donation for this libraries program. In case, you wish to know more about our libraries program and various facets associated with it. Please free to contact our office on all the days.
 
Thanking you
 
Yours Sincerely


Please do not pass this message by.

CRITICAL THINKING IS AT RISK.

Here are some of the big reasons why:

  1. Many people believe that critical thinking should be free and that scholars qualified to teach critical thinking should do so for free. Accordingly, they do not think they should have to pay for critical thinking textbooks, courses, or other resources when there is "so much free material online" - despite how erroneous that material may be.
  2. There are many misguided academicians, and some outright charlatans, pushing forth and capitalizing on a pseudo-, partial, or otherwise impoverished concept of critical thinking.
  3. Little to no funding is designated for critical thinking professional development in schools, colleges, or universities, despite the lip service widely given to critical thinking (as is frequently found in mission statements).
  4. Most people, including faculty, think they already know what critical thinking is, despite how few have studied it to any significant degree, and despite how few can articulate a coherent, accurate, and sufficiently deep explanation of it.
  5. People rarely exhibit the necessary level of discipline to study and use critical thinking for reaching higher levels of self-actualization. In part, this is due to wasting intellectual and emotional energy on fruitless electronic entertainment designed to be addictive and profitable rather than educational and uplifting.
  6. On the whole, fairminded critical thinking is neither understood, fostered, nor valued in educational institutions or societies.
  7. People are increasingly able to cluster themselves with others of like mind through alluring internet platforms that enable them to validate one another's thinking - even when their reasoning is nonsensical, lopsided, prejudiced, or even dangerous.
  8. Critical thinking does not yet hold an independent place in academia. Instead, "critical thinking" is continually being "defined" and redefined according to any academic area or instructor that, claiming (frequently unsupported) expertise, steps forward to teach it.

As you see, increasingly powerful trends against the teaching, learning, and practice of critical thinking entail extraordinary challenges to our mission. To continue our work, we must now rely upon your financial support. If critical thinking matters to you, please click here to contribute what you can today.

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO CONTINUE OUR WORK.

Thank you for your support of ethical critical thinking.