Teach Critical Thinking

Since all the Doubtcasters are in the education field, I was wondering if you could help me in finding some good resources on the basics of how to think critically and to use and recognize sound logic. I am interested books for both school aged children and adults.

I found this website http://www.criticalthinking.org They have a very extensive (self published) library. Their home school kit has a bunch of mini books with titles like -
Critical Thinking: Concepts & Tools
How to Detect Media Bias & Propaganda
The Art of Asking Essential Questions
The Art of Socratic Questioning
The Aspiring Thinker's Guide
The International Critical Thinking Reading and Writing

I am also especially interested in their book 'Fallacies: The Art of Mental Trickery'
I looked it up on Amazon and it only had 2 reviews, but they were both very positive.

Has anybody else know about the Foundation for Critical Thinking and their educational tools? I am afraid of buying a bunch of disguised crap like the stuff at this site: http://churchofcriticalthinking.org/

Thank you.

Learning to Think Things Through by gerald nosich. gerry's a brilliant guy, and he did a fantastic job on this book. best yet, you can use this by itself or as an addendum to pretty much any course you're teaching. the subtitle is "A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum." i highly recommend it.

You may wish to consider:

Raising Free Thinkers by Dale McGowan

Maybe Yes Maybe No by Dan Barker

These are on my continuously expanding reading wish list! I'm curious to see what others also recommend.

A major part of critical thinking is understanding a bit of psychology, to know the sorts of biases and delusions our psychology predisposes us to.

Another thing is that your average person off the street may not find a critical thinking manual appealing reading, so it might be a hard sell to get someone to read a book specificallly on critical thinking. Yet everybody loves to read about themselves...

So for these reasons, the book I like to recommend to people is "A Mind of its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives" by Cordelia Fine. It's very accessible, entertaining, and packed with information and case studies that show the crucial aspects of human psychology that lead us to error in thought.

Outside of literary material, there's of course much good critical thinking material online. I'd like to recommend an excellent source for learning some critical thinking concepts - a user by the name of Qualiasoup on YouTube. Here's a sample of the sort of videos he makes (Titled "The problem with anecdotes"):



All of his videos are excellent, and several, like the one above, deal with critical thinking issues.