Julie Bogart on Helping Kids Become Critical Thinkers

Debbie: 

Hey Julie, welcome back to the podcast.

Julie Bogart: 

It’s so good to be here and nice to see you again.

Debbie: 

It’s nice to see you too. And I’m really excited to get into this. When you were on the show probably a year ago now, maybe more, we talked about moving through writing resistance. And I’m just going to say right now, listeners, that was such a good conversation. I got so much feedback from that. And if you haven’t heard it, go back and listen to that. But at the time, I was like, oh, I really want to talk about your work on raising critical thinkers. And that’s what we’re going to do today. So I’m excited about that.

Julie Bogart:

That’s awesome.

Debbie: 

So I guess as a way to start, I would love to just kind of talk about the landscape of critical thinking. And I’m curious to know why you are so drawn to that. Why is that the thing that you feel so passionate about sharing with the world?

Julie Bogart:

Yeah, you know, a lot of people assume that it’s because of our current political climate or just the contentiousness of this era in history where we’re so globally connected and everybody has a say online. But for me, it really did start back in the 1990s and it did coincide with the dawn of the internet for me. I was participating on a discussion board with other homeschool mothers.

Women who are very similar to me, we were stay at home moms, we were white, we were heterosexual and married, we are of the same political and religious background largely, and yet we still got into these massive bloodbath fights. Things like, should you be a Pampers parent or have a diaper subscription service for cloth diapers? Should you have a VBAC after you’ve had a cesarean section? Is it okay to bottle feed your baby? Like all the parenting wars, but then we also argued over doctrinal differences and sometimes they were such minor hair splitting differences. And yet I was watching women just go to the mat, like my view is right and I can’t believe you have this view. And you know, in a lot of ways we were nice to each other, but we would press up against some deeply held conviction. And then instead of there being like a conversation to better understand each other, it would just go into this like, how can you possibly think that there’s all the facts? I’ve laid them out for you. How are you not seeing the truth? And so what I got interested in was less figuring out what was true. And instead I was wondering, why does everyone think they’re right? How is it that everyone is persuaded that what they think is the correct interpretation of any perspective?

And that sort of sent me on a journey of really examining sources of authority, data, loyalty to various membership communities, because a lot of times what clouds your thinking more than any data is the feeling of belonging. You are so well attached to either your family, your church, your temple, your political party, your breastfeeding group that you can’t even hear anything that contradicts it because you are worried about being kicked out. And so it was this kind of dynamic that became really fascinating to me. And I’ve really been studying it and thinking about it for 30 years.

Debbie: 

Wow. Oh my gosh. So my notes right now, I wrote down cults, belonging, Noam Chomsky. Like I want to go in so many different directions right now. Well, and you talk about this and I think it’s the forward for your paperback version of racing critical thinkers. You talk about The Vow and some of these documentaries on HBO, which I can assume like I am so into.

Julie Bogart:

Those are all good ones.

Debbie: 

All the reality, yes, all the shows about cults, but you know, you talked about starting to think about this in the 90s. Can you give us kind of a temperature check on where we are now with regards to some of, I guess, the threats against being a critical thinker?

Julie Bogart:

Yeah, I mean, I think the internet initiated a whole new way of understanding ourselves. First of all, everyone had access to a public square in a way that we never had before. You can be published right now. Just get a social media account, type some words and people will read them. And that did not exist in quite the way it does now until the nineties. And really social media amplified that in the twenties, you know, the two thousands. But what I really was more interested in is what was the force that created this belief that if I just trotted out what I considered a fact, everyone would fall in line and agree with me. And really what I discovered is it really points back to public education and the structure of school that we inaugurated in the 19th century. Up until public education, really the first public school that we have record of is like in the 1600s. But, it didn’t become a widespread model until the 19th century. Before that, it was the privileged who had tutors and there was much more of a personal education, not a standardized one. And in a standardized education, one of the key features is there’s a source of authority and that authority is in the room with you. It’s a teacher. They usually are standing while the students are seated. There is an endowed understanding that that person knows more than the people in the seats. And when those students are tested, they are tested in such a way that they should all come up with the same answer. So if you’re doing a multiple choice test, the teacher does not ask you, well, why did you pick B and why did she pick C? They say, actually, the answer is A and you’re both wrong. Or if you got A, you’re correct. And it applies equally to all 30 kids, regardless of their background, their personal experiences, their religious disposition, their socioeconomics, their political party. And because we exclude all the factors of identity, what we start to overvalue is this authoritative perspective of one person. And so what happened online is people were used to this idea that if I cited an authority, we would all look at that authority and go, oh, well, they know more than I do. And we would all fall in line. What we didn’t account for is that we have such a variety of authorities. Is it your pastor? Is it mine? Is it your husband? Is it my sister? Is it the PhD at the university? Is it the article I just read in Vogue magazine? Like, what is the authoritative source for this conversation?

And are we going to prioritize anecdotes and personal experience or research? But is that research unbiased or is it just called research? Like these are all questions we don’t typically ask. We’re learning to ask them better now. I’ve seen some marked improvements, even while the whole country is polarizing more, but you can see people trying to appeal to a more reasonable analysis, not just assuming because someone said it, it must be true. But it is still very cloudy out there and to be a critical thinker isn’t to have the right source of authority. It’s to be self -aware that you are coming with a bias, that you are actually being pushed by a lot of internal factors that make you sometimes automatically discredit something just because you don’t want it to be true.

Debbie: 

Mm -hmm. Oh my gosh. I really just want to go have a very long lunch with you and talk about all these things. OK. I’m so sparked by this. OK. That sounds perfect. That sounds great. So what I’m thinking as you’re sharing this is I remember reading maybe in the early aughts about the fact that there was a generation of young people and I don’t know if it was the millennials, but going into the workforce and that they didn’t have this kind of inherent skill of being a creative problem solver. Like they weren’t asking the right questions. And so this seems like a separate thing, but like not having the critical thinking skills. And so why is it so important? Like, you know, why, I mean, you’ve kind of talked about it in broad terms, but why is it so critical that our kids grow up to be critical thinkers.

Julie Bogart:

So first, creative problem solving is directly related to critical thinking because you have to be able to shed your fixed understanding in order to be creative. Creativity by definition means that you are ejecting yourself from habits of knowing and thinking. And so one of the powers of creative problem solving is the capacity to take yourself out of that habitual way of looking at something. So for creative problem solving, you are automatically a critical thinker. Critical thinking, the reason it matters is because we cannot problem solve through conversion. And you know, you mentioned cults at the beginning of this. Religions, cults, political parties have adopted a conversion mentality. Even corporations have what they would call their evangelists, right? The people who go out and shill, you know, for Procter and Gamble or for Johnson and Johnson. Why do they do that? Because we’ve been trained in a model for generations that revival is what saves us. If we can all get on the same page, then we’ll all finally have this kumbaya moment where we will have the correct solutions and they will apply to the entire community. What we’ve discovered through the Internet, through immigration, through globalization is that we are too interconnected now to sort of become these small units, what we might have called a tribe or a nation state or a community. We are too interconnected with people who are not members of our group. And the conversion model fails over and over again. It is not, it’ll win some people, but it can never win everyone. So what we end up having is we have these high stakes arguments where I’m saying, hey, my little, smaller non-minority community is being run over by the values of your larger community. And the larger community is saying, just get with the program, just get with the program. And the minority community is saying, but my needs, my rights, the things that I value are being eliminated from this conversation. So I’m going to put a stake in the ground and just ruin all of your plans. That’s what they do. 

What we really want is the capacity to imagine that there are multiple points of view that have value on any given issue. And then we want to creative problem solve in a way that accounts for as many of those views as we possibly can. So I love to use gun rights as a really good example because we often have polarizing views about that. What would happen if our gun policy included the experiences and knowledge of a police officer, of a security guard, of a victim of gun violence, of a handgun owner, of the person who sells guns, of the people who have been victims of a mass shooting. Like what would happen if we actually listened to a hunting enthusiast, right? Or somebody who’s fought in the military and we brought all of those perspectives to the table and we didn’t automatically devalue the ones that didn’t align with us, but we thought, well, what do they bring to the table in this conversation? How can we incorporate the claims they have? Sometimes it’s very challenging to do. We’re experiencing that with the abortion issue right now, but by bringing more viewpoints to the table and trying to imagine a world that includes more viewpoints, we actually get to better policy. And that’s just in a political arena. We can drill down to like what to do in a family because that’s where we start.

Debbie: 

Yeah. Yes. So in the way you’re describing that, I think it might be unexpected for listeners to, you know, when you think about this conversation on raising critical thinkers, that really it’s creating bridges between, you know, and connection as opposed to you might hear the word critical thinker and think that you’re going to be like very dismissive or critical of other points of view. But that’s not what we’re talking about at all.

Julie Bogart:

No, I’m so glad you brought that up because the idea of being a critical thinker in most people’s minds is, hey, I can find fault in the other guy’s thinking. And then it’s a gotcha moment, right? And it’s really funny because I’ve done, you know, several years of podcast interviews now about this topic and I’ve been interviewed by many men. Men weren’t interested in my homeschool stuff, but they got very interested in critical thinking. And I have been interviewed by both ends of the political spectrum. And they always think that their group is the critical thinkers. And they think I’m their ally to pull in the other side. And I find it so humorous. It’s sort of like, we all think we’re good drivers and clearly that can’t be true. There are accidents every day, you know, I know I’m not a good driver. I’ve been in too many accidents, but it’s having the self -awareness to recognize that your perspective is limited. Like if you got behind the eyes of the person you disagree with most, if you had had their life experiences, their traumas, their opportunities, their relationships, you would be drawing their conclusions. They are not lacking information. We’re lacking the information that helps us understand the way they compose their worldview.

Debbie: 

So good so good Okay, so I do want to pivot and talk about the family and then we have to get into your workbook as well. So just to circle back then within the family, I’m wondering what families, what parents do that kind of gets in the way or interferes with what we’re doing here and our goal of raising critical thinkers.

Julie Bogart:

Yes. Okay, so I’m so glad this is where we’re going next because this is the fun part of the conversation for me. So think about the ways that you talk to your children currently. Back when I was raising kids in the 80s and 90s, the thinking was that children needed to do what their parents asked them to do, to obey, to cooperate quickly. And if they didn’t, then they needed to be persuaded with some kind of punishment, spanking or a timeout or some kind of talking to or a limit on screen time. You know, it was very punitive. So the next generation, my kid’s age, maybe yours, they came along and they’re like, yeah, we don’t like that model. We really want our children to understand why they have to cooperate. And so now what parents do is they lecture their children. And here’s what I think’s really funny. Cooperation to me is just the word we use for manipulative obedience. What we’re basically saying is do what I say. Oh, you don’t want to? Now I’m going to indoctrinate you into my reasoning. 

You know, in the old strategy, it was just like, recognize authority. The authority wins, you lose. Now it’s, I’m going to talk you into agreeing with me, which is actually undermining the power of critical thinking. So here’s an example of what it might look like to foster it rather than lecture. So let’s say it’s time for dinner. You’ve got a seven-year-old child. You say to that child, hey, go wash your hands. We’re getting ready for dinner.

And this child who has routinely washed their hands suddenly says, yeah, I don’t want to. Now, what a parent in today’s life might do is say, oh honey, you’ve got to, you’ve been playing all day, you’ve got germs all over your hands. If you eat food and eat the germs, it’ll make you sick. This is what science tells us, please go wash your hands. Okay, so that’s basically saying you don’t know yourself and you don’t know the right information. So I’m gonna power over your experience and tell you the information that you should value so that you’ll do what I value. That is a conversion mentality. A critical thinking mentality would pause and ask a curious question. Oh, you washed your hands easily yesterday. You don’t want to now what’s going on. Now your child could have a variety of reactions. So I’m just gonna pick a couple and show you how I might work with this answer. So the child might say, you know, I don’t like the water. And so now the question is, oh, this is no longer about germs. The child just doesn’t like the water. So you can come over and say to that child, is it the temperature? And you might get a thermometer and figure out what temperature the child prefers. You might discover they don’t like their hands to be wet. So you suggest hand sanitizer. Now they don’t like it to be sticky. So maybe you do a little research and you find out that you could just blow dry their hands with a blow dryer, no water, and kill the germs with heat, right? So you could experiment, explore, find out how their experience impacts this conversation. But what if your child actually doesn’t really know? Maybe they’re just busy playing and they don’t want to stop. Could you, the next time, start the process earlier? Because maybe it has nothing to do with germs. But here’s the final thing I want to say.

Kids make us interrogate our own beliefs if we really stop to think about it. Because maybe that lecture about germs isn’t landing because your child saw you yesterday in Target with your toddler who spit out a pacifier that landed on the ground that you picked up, sucked the germs off of with your own mouth, and popped it back in that baby’s mouth. How much do you believe in your theology around germs? Is this just a belief you’ve picked up uncritically and you’re passing it on as almost like folklore, but it isn’t actually based on your beliefs around germs? Could you just roll the dice and say to your child, you know what, we don’t always wash our hands before food, you’re right. I’m willing to take a risk, are you? Let’s see how it goes for a week. In other words, you give your child either the capacity to tell you what other information they need, you give them an opportunity to experiment. You give them the opportunity to not believe your authority just because you said it. And this is a way that we start to establish in a family that thinking matters, not cooperation. Now, you can’t do this every day for every meal, for every conversation. Sometimes you just got to buckle a kid in a car seat and not discuss why it matters and what they don’t like about the buckle. But I do recommend doing this several times a month if you can, because this is what lays the foundation for them to value their own reasoning process.

Debbie: 

Yeah, such a great example. And of course, you know, as you’re saying that I hear my dad’s voice saying, because I said so, which was like the mantra of my youth and probably many listeners here as well. And it’s also making me think of Alfie Kohn’s work in Unconditional Parenting and when I read that book, and I think Ash was maybe nine and I was like, Oh my gosh, why, why am I, why do I care about this? And why is this the hill I’m going to die on when I have no idea why I’m even making this an important issue in our life.

Julie Bogart:

A hundred percent. And the thing is, they’re going to keep having views you don’t have. So when we start with like a five or a seven year old, where we’re actually giving some dignity to their own self -representation, even if it’s limited by their youth, their immaturity and their lack of experience, you are teaching them how to investigate why they even have that reaction. So that by the time they’re 16 and they’re arguing with you about staying out past midnight or driving downtown without supervision, you’re having a conversation from the place of problem solving, not cooperating with a parent’s set of fears, right? And it changes, you know, sort of the playing field for what it means to take responsibility, to have agency, to think through your own claims.

Debbie: 

Yeah, I love that you use the word dignity. That’s just such an important word when we think about the way we’re raising our kids. And I just like to associate that with parenting and childhood. So one more question on this, and then we’ll take a quick break. And we’re really going to get into your workbook. But I just want to ask, especially in this climate, there seems to be a growing backlash against you know, whether it’s gentle parenting or parenting that is very focused on, you know, prioritizing what we’re talking about today, really. And so I’m just wondering your thoughts on that and why parents feel, some parents feel so threatened by what we’re talking about.

Julie Bogart:

You know, it’s so challenging to raise children. We have this baby placed in our arms who we immediately picture as a grownup fulfilling our dreams of living out an unlived life of our own, right? This is a clean slate person. And we get very attached to the idea that we’re going to give our child the advantages we didn’t get. Even if we were pretty advantaged, those parents want at least as good as what they got. And so what ends up happening is we become propaganda machines for our own vision of what we imagine our child will be. And we get to that vision through a variety of parenting dynamics. Some people are attracted to that gentle attachment parenting style. Others are more to the resiliency, you know, personal agency, free ranging, whatever. All of that is about a parental fantasy. It’s not actually about the child. And so part of what I hope parents come to when they look at my work and they read Raising Critical Thinkers or they do these activities in becoming a critical thinker with their teens is to just become more self -aware of their own agenda. We come with an agenda and we are attracted to parenting styles based on that agenda. It’s not because those parenting styles are pure. It’s because they meet some fantasy that we’ve erected almost unconsciously about our children and so being willing to get with reality. You know, I did a reel this week that was saying, you think you know your children, but you don’t. Who they become is not who you thought they were at age 10. And that form just keeps shape shifting. I remember my mother complaining or not complaining, worrying about my sister one time. My sister was in her fifties and she was worried about something and she was worried the way a mother worries. And I paused and I said, Oh, Oh my gosh. You mean this does not end. I’m still going to be trying to help my kid at 50 to land on their feet. And she’s like, yeah, no, that never stops. And you know, it’s true when I went through my divorce, who did I call? My mother, who helped me through it? My mother. So I think part of it is letting go of this idea that we’re going to raise these, you know, indomitable, fail -safe adults. You know, if we can get with that, we will be a lot further along on the program.

Debbie: 

Well, I did watch your reel when you released it on Instagram, the one you just referenced and I was like, oh my God, she is speaking to me. Like I needed to hear that message so much. So thank you for that. I’ll have a link in the show notes. You guys should check it out and also check out Julie’s Instagram in general, because you do so much great content on there. Okay, so you have a brand new book out. It is for kids. Oh, she’s holding it up. I should have a screenshot of that. So it is called Becoming a Critical Thinker, a workbook to help students think well in an age of disinformation. So can you tell us about that book and why you put it out there and who it’s for?

Julie Bogart:

Yeah, it’s a good story. My publisher was so thrilled with the success of Raising Critical Thinkers. You know, we didn’t know how that book would do and it’s just been crushing. It’s been going great. And they said, well, what about a workbook for students? And I actually laughed. I said, I am the queen of anti -workbooks. We do not have them in my company, BraveWriter. I don’t like workbooks. So we had kind of a conversation about it and they said, well, what if you wrote a workbook that you know you would use or something that felt more like a journal. And they gave me a couple of examples in their catalog line and I was like, oh, this I can picture. So it’s called a workbook, but really it’s like a journal. And basically what I’ve done is I’ve taken the practices that I included in raising critical thinkers and I rewrote them for teens, made them very clear for 12 to 18 year olds. And there’s space to write in, bubbles to fill in, rankings, columns, all different formats for writing. And then I added a slew of additional activities that are not in Raising Critical Thinkers. And I broke it down into three sections so that our kids can really learn how to be good critical thinkers. So the first part is called the foundation, understanding critical thinking. Then the second part is, the practice, growing your thinking skills. And part three is the application, learning the art of interpretation. So we go from learning what it is to growing those skills to applying it so that you can make good interpretations of any information that comes your way. And these activities include things like movie reviews, eavesdropping on coffeehouse conversations, talking about the silent films of ideas that are in our minds that shape how we think, taking an academic selfie, flipping the camera lens around on your own mind and examining the way that you form your worldview, how to identify red flags in data, all that kind of stuff. So it’s really oriented towards that emerging academic mind. And my thought is, if you do this in high school, junior high and high school, your kids will be so far ahead of the curve in college, you just won’t believe it. Because these are the kinds of skills that I was taught in grad school, right? I don’t know why we don’t trust our teens with more sort of self -awareness and critical thinking tools. We tend to think they need to be stuffed with viewpoints and information rather than getting them to investigate and comment on the meaning they’re generating from that information because that’s the foundation of critical thinking.

Debbie: 

Yeah, so as you’re saying that, I’m thinking about this idea of media literacy, right? And that was kind of the thing in like the 90s or even the 80s when I was at university, late 80s. And I remember watching, what was that documentary, Killing Her Softly, about women, portrayals of women, sexualized portrayals of women in advertisements. And that blew my mind, right? And that was it. That was the conversation. I was like, wow, I need to look at things more differently. OK, check. So as I was reading your workbook, I was definitely feeling like this is so robust. This feels like a course to me. And is it a course? Could you see this as something that parents would roll out over a semester or schools?

Julie Bogart:

Yes. Absolutely. It’s got 32 activities in it and they each can take a week to do. Some will take longer. So you could easily use this for an entire school year. And I think it should be essential learning in any school year. Now parents have often asked me, do you buy more than one if you have more than one teen? And I mean, of course that would be wonderful. I’d love you to do that. Or you can use the workbook as a textbook and have them do the writing on their own sheets of paper. What I do know about teens is they very much love writing in books. They love having their own tool, something that is their own possession. So if you have a teen like that, then buy an individual copy for them. I’ve also had parents ask me, can I do the workbook for my own development? And that is 100 % yes from me. These activities might at times seem like they’re oriented to teens, because I was trying to find social issues that they care about, but you care about them, particularly if you have a teen. So in my view, it would be just as powerful for an adult as for a young adult.

Debbie: 

Yeah, agreed. I especially loved lesson eight. There was a lesson called how the new media pushes viewpoints. And I was a broadcast journalism major in undergrad. I was really into ethics and news. Like that was my thing. Like, should we have music in a news show? And, you know, right? Like, what does that do? So I love that you included that here. And of course, if I was back then, if I could have flash forwarded to see where we are today, I would have been horrified. So take us inside that a little bit. What would you want, for example, kids to know about the news that they consume?

Julie Bogart:

Oh my gosh. Yes. Yeah, so it’s funny, you know, we all have our formative moments. You talked about your one with the women’s sexual assault in the media. For me, I remember being an exchange student in France in college. And one of the activities we did when we were working on learning French, you know, I knew some French, but I was a student and I was still learning it. They had us have four different newspapers from France and we had to analyze the headlines of the front page of each one and see if we could come up with what angle, what viewpoint was being conveyed in this language that was not natural to us. So it was very difficult to know, are they pushing a viewpoint and is it more conservative or more liberal or more progressive? And that really struck me. And because we did it in a foreign language, it had a bigger impact. And so when I went back to the States, I noticed language and headlines in ways I never had before in English. And of course we fast forward and now we’ve got chyrons telling us what to think about while we’re listening to a talking head on a new show. We’ve got all different news media, websites and apps giving us information in sound bites and in Twitter and in threads. And so yeah, it’s even more essential now that we get to know how we are being shaped, how we are being pushed toward a viewpoint or even held back from having a viewpoint. That’s equally powerful in those headlines. Yeah.

Debbie: 

So one of the lessons you have is on perspective taking and tolerance and deconstructing familiar stories. And I wondered as I’m reading that, I’m wondering about some of the additional challenges in doing this for neurodivergent kids who may have, you know, more distorted thinking, maybe more negative in the way they see the world, may have more rigid or fixed ways of seeing the world. And I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how to help those kids who are really grounded in deconstruct ideas that might kind of keep them closed off from accepting other points of view.

Julie Bogart:

One of my favorite methods for perspective taking is acting, literally acting. So having a student memorize lines and learn how to go into character for someone who is not them is a way for them to experience the reality that there is an entirely different embodied experience in a different person. So instead of trying to get them to understand your viewpoint, have them try to understand what it was like to be Ophelia, to be a character who has a viewpoint that is unique to that person. The thing that’s nice about acting is that it allows you to inhabit a perspective without it threatening the fact that you have one. So you get to inhabit it, but there’s this nice bright line between your identity and the perspective that you are adopting for the sake of acting.

And why I like that is because usually when we’re asking kids to take perspectives, we’re asking them to be more empathetic. And when you are asking someone to be empathetic, you’re asking them to let go of their strongly held position long enough to extend empathy. And that feels very threatening to certain temperaments. There are some people who, when they make that exchange, they feel lost, they feel overlooked. Neurodivergent kids actually have a more limited capacity to do that. But what I’ve discovered is that if you can help them feel this shift, like I’m going to take on this other role, this other kind of person, and just see what that feels like, knowing they can safely retreat to themselves, you start to show them the world in its more complexity, in a more complex way. 

Debbie: 

Yeah, so interesting. My husband was an actor and, you know, is neurodivergent. And now that you’re saying that, like, that’s why he started going into acting in high school, because it helped him make sense of the world. So I appreciate that.

Julie Bogart:

That’s really incredible. And I think you can do it in less formal ways, right? Like you can play act with your child, a debate. Pretend that you believe in X. How can you defend that? And what would be the kinds of experiences a person would have that would support X? It’s very tricky to do. One of the places that I did it when I was in adulthood, I was an actress when I was young, but as an adult, I got interested because of the internet in trying to understand opposing viewpoints. So if I took a very strong stand on a position like abortion, I won’t share which position I had at the time, but I remember reading somewhere and they said, well, this side of the argument has the moral high ground. And I was like, no, they don’t. I have the moral high ground. They should know that they don’t. But that statement was so alarming to me. I thought, maybe I’ve never read that position from someone who believes it’s the moral high ground. Maybe I need to at least start with how they see their position, not how my position sees their position. And that sent me on a multi -year search. I started reading everything I could. And over time, I felt like I had such a much wider picture of the whole issue. And that’s what it means to grow empathy. It’s not in one conversation.

It’s the willingness to put yourself in an uncomfortable place where you are willing to believe that the other actor is rational. You can get inside their skin and trace down the interior logic. It doesn’t mean you agree. It just means given everything they know and who they are, their viewpoint logically coheres. That’s a pretty high level skill. A lot of adults don’t have it, but I have been really encouraged by how teens can get there when they’re given the right tools because they are not as fixed in their thinking as adults.

Debbie: 

Mm -hmm. Yeah, I would say that’s true in conversations I’ve had with my 19 -year -old about current events. And he’s taken me inside some of the discourse that’s happening on Discord about these issues. And I’m pleasantly surprised at how they’re talking about things and communicating with very divergent backgrounds and ideas. But they’re doing it. So that’s kind of cool.

Julie Bogart:

Amazing. That really encourages me, honestly. And just remember, any viewpoint you had at 15, I mean, how many of us hold the same exact views we had at 15? People evolve. So they’re going to test their ideas. One of my kids had a really strong view about a ballot issue in Ohio when he was 15 and he wasn’t old enough to vote. So he kind of put together almost a PowerPoint level argument with me, like went through, he did all his research, he had all these articles, he was showing me where to read. And we had this long talk and I was very affirming. I’m like, you did such an impressive job. You know this idea so well. He said, so are you going to vote pro? I said, I’m voting con. And his eyes squirted tears. And he said, mom, I count on you to be logical. And I started laughing and I said, honey, I appreciate everything that you just expressed. And probably by the time you’re an adult, this issue will change. But you never accounted for my position and my position is still this and it has its logical coherence to it, even though you don’t want me to hold it. But I think we can have a good conversation even when we don’t see it the same way. And interestingly enough, he’s in his thirties now, so double the age and he has much more capacity to see what my concerns were. But I also have much more capacity to appreciate why his position mattered in the larger marketplace because it was an early debate that has flowered over the last 15 years. So these are things to keep in mind that you’re not having the last conversation with your child every time something comes up where you don’t agree.

Debbie: 

Yeah, so great. So great. So all right, I want to kind of recap. Your book is called Becoming a Critical Thinker, a workbook to help students think well in an age of disinformation. There’s so much that we haven’t gotten into today. It is, again, as I said before, very robust. It’s literally like a whole course in curriculum. What would you want listeners to kind of take away from this and make sure that they know about this book and about this larger conversation?

Julie Bogart:

I feel like we’re on the path to really reforming how we understand education. And part of that is because of the rise of artificial intelligence, which is throwing the best monkey wrench into education that we’ve had in two centuries. And when I say that, I mean it with all sincerity. There are reasons to be afraid of AI, but what I think AI is telling us is, the rote skills that we thought schooling was about are less important today. And what really matters is original thinking, critical thinking, problem solving. These large language models like Gemini and ChatGPT, they issue 1 .7 million hallucinations a day. A hallucination is an error in fact. So when your kids go to use these tools for starter text or to help them compose essays, if they don’t know how to vet information, if they don’t know how to track it down, make sure it’s accurate, understand the nuances and argue to defend it, they’re going to struggle in college and even in high school. This is not an argument about whether or not we should let AI write our papers. It’s actually how will this tool either empower or disempower thinking? And my hope is that it will be like Photoshop was to photographers. It will actually empower good thinking. So to me, in an age where artificial intelligence is coming like a tidal wave, it is essential to train your kids in how to think well, how to vet sources, how to understand data and research, and how to be the kinds of contributors to the future of the world that take into account a wide variety of perspectives, not just their own groups.

Debbie: 

Yeah, I was really happy to see you end the workbook with the conversation about OpenAI and Touch EPT. And I was very curious to see your take on it. So I love that you’re not talking about it as something to fear. And this is like, in fact, how can we use this as a tool because it’s not going away. So I love that viewpoint.

Julie Bogart:

I always joke with people who are afraid of it. I have two things I like to say. I say, be afraid of the nuclear bomb. We were capable of creating that and we’ve already dropped it twice, you know, atom bombs. So if we have something to truly fear, it’s weaponry. That’s the thing that humans are capable of that is so destructive. But then the other thing I like to say is parents and adults were very afraid of the internet, what it would do to education. You know, the rise in pornography online, all of that. And all of those things came to pass and we’re still all on the internet. AI is here. It has its limits. It needs its guardrails. We will have policy. The EU has already started to institute guidelines to kind of rein it in, but we are not going to avoid it. It is here. And so my aim is to take somewhat of a technological optimistic view like Herman Kahn where the problems technology creates, technology can solve. And that is kind of my way of coping with this massively influential tool that is not going away. It is here.

Debbie: 

Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Well, thank you, Julie. This has been such a fascinating conversation, not just for me. I’m sure my listeners are going to get so much out of this. Congratulations on the book. And where would you like listeners to go to check out your work?

Julie Bogart:

Thank you. Yeah. If you go to raisingcriticalthinkers.com, that’s where you’ll see both raising critical thinkers and becoming a critical thinker, links, downloads, all that kind of stuff. And then for my writing company, bravewriter .com is where we sell writing curriculum. And we teach this kind of thinking in our online writing classes. So if you’re looking for sort of breakthrough level writing classes for your students, it would be a great place. The classes run three to six weeks. They’re not like semester length and they work really well whether you homeschool or use traditional schooling models. And then finally, I am on Instagram at Julie Bravewriter.

Debbie: 

Well, thank you again. Such a great conversation. I really appreciate it.

Julie Bogart:

Thanks for having me, Debbie.