On Critical Thinking

by: Glenn Hancock

We’ll come to education as a whole before long. For now, I want to focus on one piece of it that most of us were never given, and that most of our children aren’t getting.

Ask a student today what critical thinking is and how to use it. Then ask yourself. Most of us can’t answer, and it isn’t a failure of intelligence — nobody taught us. Just as we were never taught how to study, we were never taught how to think. I am not suggesting schools should tell our children what to think, only that they should be given the proper tools to know how to do it if they ever decide to.

An example may make the point better than a definition. Consider Billy and Alice. They live in the same neighborhood and attend different schools. Billy’s school is the one we all know — every required subject, taught the way the state has determined it should be taught, measured the way the state has determined it should be measured.

Alice’s school is something else. She has been taught to read, to write, and to do arithmetic. Beyond that, her day is reading in the morning and debate in the afternoon. The reading might be literature, a newspaper, a court opinion, a manufacturer’s warranty — anything with an argument in it. Long books come chapter by chapter. Global warming, energy policy, the parties and what they claim — all of it is on the table. Students bring their own material, and some of it gets chosen. There are laboratories for anything she wants to chase down, and she is required to use none of them.

There are no tests. There is only the debate, and the debates are brutal. She will be asked where she got that, how she knows, and what would have to be true for her to be wrong. Every afternoon, in front of everyone. Even the students who aren’t gifted speakers are encouraged to ask questions, and the best questions and presentations are chosen after each debate.

Which school would you send your child to?

You’re already objecting that Alice can’t do algebra. That’s fair, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But answer the other half: how long will Billy remember his algebra, and what will he do with it? He can carry out the procedure. Can he tell you when someone is using numbers to mislead him? Can he read a press release and find what it carefully doesn’t say? Alice has a knowledge gap that she’s been taught to fill. Billy has knowledge he’ll never use and will have forgotten before he graduates.

So what does any of this have to do with critical thinking?

Critical thinking isn’t complicated, and it isn’t a course number. It’s learning to ask the right questions. Reading something — whether you agree with it or not — and questioning the author about the position he’s taken. Watching a program or a video without being pulled along by it, and asking who was holding the camera, and why the camera was there at all. It’s reading to consider rather than reading to absorb. It’s asking questions to understand something, or to point out a flaw. We’re told constantly that the country is split down the middle. I’d put it differently. We’re not divided by our answers nearly as much as by the fact that hardly any of us are asking questions before we pick one.

In the September 16, 2026 edition of The Covington News, an article ran under the headline “State of the Community: An upward trajectory.” It reported that a state representative attended a Development Authority meeting with a presentation on how well the county is doing. The article told us, “The numbers don’t lie.” Most people read the headline and moved on. Among those who read the whole thing, I’d wager very few noticed what the article left out entirely.

Not a single figure in that presentation related to Newton County.