Critical thinking is the skill that allows us to evaluate situations rationally, without letting emotions take over our thoughts.

Critical thinking involves a process of judgment based on reason and logical reasoning. When we apply critical thinking, we can view things from a neutral point of view, avoiding misunderstandings, conflicts and discomfort, derived from skills in the brain area responsible for emotions.

Furthermore, critical thinking helps to form opinions, makes our decisions more assertive and improves our ability to argue.

Some of the foundations of critical thinking include:

• nonconformity
• proactivity
• cognitive abilities
• • Problem solving
• critical spirit.

The expression “thinking brings work” is well known in Portugal, but the truth is that “thinking doesn’t bring employment”. There are no jobs when managers look for robots who obey their orders, without question.

In the Education sector, there are teachers exhausted by bureaucratic demands that occupy them more than what was their choice, such as sharing knowledge; teachers exhausted by dynamics with students that are the result of automated or decompensated families; and even teachers whose own emotional imbalances make them bureaucrats.

In this demanding universe, there are children and adolescents, full of hormones and eager for synapses, which occur in the presence of constant and fast-moving lines of thought. Questions arise, non-conformity, proactiveness to change what prevents the Construction of a Better World and a critical spirit.

By preventing critical thinking in Education, we are cutting off future problem solvers, the inventors of creative solutions and the ones with Vision. We are preventing the arrival of THE NECESSARY FUTURE.

We are promoting social ostracism, we are imprisoning the expression of thought. We are surgically and methodically castrating human’s greatest skill.

Physical freedom can be seen. But other types of freedom can not, and they are under threat:

• emotional (we cannot be weak, we have to create money)
• choices outside the norm (the norm is to leave in the morning and return in the late afternoon)
• that of thinking (we have to think “well”, and that means thinking “the same”).

And “the same” to another person, who also thinks that “thinking well” is thinking like someone else And so this way of living is spread and consolidated, in which one obeys and does not question, does not reject, does not alter, does not change!

It is only accepted that we think IF we think like those in charge, this privileged being who had the first (and only!) truly critical and creative thought. The other thinkers, those outside the norm, are considered rebels, troublemakers, ignorant and disobedient.

And disobedient to whom, to what?! To the standard of the arrogant, the incompetent, the insecure, the lazy, those who want the world as it is because this “state of as it is” brings them benefits.

It has already been possible to gag the elderly, due to their physical and, increasingly, economic fragility, which is compounded by loneliness and abandonment.

It has already been successful in imprisoning the active adult (understand, the one who has a job), with a salary and corresponding hours, which prevents him/her from Being an Individual, from being a present and caring Father or Mother, making him/her a slave for the income at the end of the month, at the same time that they transfer this state of slavery to their homes and families.

We are witnessing the mass expansion of training activities for unemployed people, updating them on subjects that are out of line with their lifelong career path, keeping them busy and calm with training grants and hours spent, without there being any guarantee of resuming employment, a job that will promote personal satisfaction and individual evolution.

What is missing? The root. The new generations. Children, teenagers. We must prevent them from thinking critically. Otherwise, they might want to change the well-prepared scenario. Or that it was created because there was no Critical Spirit associated with Proactivity, Temperament, Courage and Creativity.

Education is given at home. Information is given in schools. Learning takes place through experimentation, trial and error. Will this be true? Will this cycle be exactly like this?

Let each one of us reflect.

And … think. Critically.

© Ana Kintsugi