Narrator: Imagine finding a love letter written by your recently deceased grandfather to your grandmother, now lost to dementia. In it, he fondly recalls a romantic encounter from the 1930s, using the phrase "made love." What does it mean? To his daughter, a former nun, the idea of premarital sex is unthinkable, a stain on her parents' memory. To her more rebellious younger sister, it’s a delightful, humanizing secret. To their mother, it’s simply impossible. The same words, the same piece of evidence, yet three completely different interpretations, each shaped by a lifetime of unique beliefs and experiences. Who is right?

This puzzle of interpretation is at the very core of Julie Bogart's book, Raising Critical Thinkers. It argues that the greatest challenge in thinking clearly isn't a lack of logic, but a lack of self-awareness. The book provides a guide for parents and educators to move beyond the simple search for "correct" answers and instead cultivate the ability to understand the hidden forces—our biases, experiences, and identities—that shape how we and our children see the world.

Narrator: Critical thinking is often taught as a set of tools for dissecting external arguments, but Bogart contends that its true starting point is internal. Before we can evaluate the world, we must first understand the narrator inside our own heads. This concept is powerfully introduced to children through stories with unreliable narrators. For instance, when the author’s son Noah, a fan of the classic "Three Little Pigs," was introduced to Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, he was captivated. In this version, the wolf claims he was framed—he just had a bad cold and needed a cup of sugar. Noah immediately understood that the storyteller’s perspective changes everything.

Bogart argues that the most important unreliable narrator we must learn to question is ourselves. We all have invisible assumptions and deep-seated biases that color our judgment. Therefore, the first step in critical thinking is to take an "academic selfie"—a moment of introspection to examine our own reactions, beliefs, and emotional responses. Until we do this internal work, any evaluation of someone else’s thinking will be clouded by our own personal static, often without us even realizing it.

Narrator: Facts are often presented as stubborn, objective truths. However, Bogart demonstrates that every fact lives inside a story, and that story is interpreted through the lens of a worldview. To think critically, one must be able to deconstruct these layers. A striking example of this is the reception of Disney's animated film Mulan. In the United States, the film was a celebrated story of individualism, self-discovery, and a young woman breaking free from patriarchal norms. American audiences, whose worldview often champions the individual, loved it.

However, when the film was released in China, it was a commercial and critical failure. Chinese audiences were puzzled by the focus on Mulan's personal ambition. In their worldview, which prioritizes family, honor, and community welfare, the original legend is a story of filial piety. Disney had reimagined the tale to fit an American worldview, and in doing so, created a story that was unrecognizable and unappealing to its culture of origin. The "facts" of the story were the same, but the context of the worldview changed the meaning entirely.

Narrator: Traditional education, Bogart argues, often stifles the natural curiosity children are born with. It frequently operates on what educator Paulo Freire called the "banking concept," where teachers deposit information into students, who are expected to memorize it and recite it back on tests. This system rewards conformity and the pursuit of the single "right" answer over genuine intellectual exploration.

Bogart illustrates this with the story of a student taking a multiple-choice test. A question showed an illustration of a tree and asked which unit of measure would be used to assess it. The options included feet and centimeters. The student, thinking logically about the small drawing on the page in front of them, chose centimeters. They were marked wrong. The test-maker intended for the student to ignore the immediate reality of the illustration and infer that it represented a real-life tree, which would be measured in feet. This kind of thinking punishes nuanced observation and rewards guessing the test-maker's intent. Instead, Bogart advocates for a "problem-posing" education that trusts children as partners in learning, sparking their curiosity rather than extinguishing it.

Narrator: A complete education cannot be found solely within the pages of a book. Bogart outlines three tiers of learning: reading, experience, and encounter. Reading is the safest way to learn, offering information at a distance. Experience, whether direct or indirect, brings learning closer, making it more personal and tangible. But the most transformative learning comes from encounter—an overwhelming, often uncomfortable, direct engagement that can overturn our entire understanding.

The author’s mother, an avid backpacker, illustrates this perfectly. For years, she read field guides about bears and saw them in zoos. She knew about bears. But one night in the wilderness, she came face-to-face with an eight-foot-tall brown bear just yards away. The ferocity, the smell, the sheer unpredictability of the animal in its own habitat—that was an encounter. It was a visceral, overwhelming moment that completely shattered everything she thought she understood from her reading. This is the kind of learning that rewires our brains and fosters a level of respect and understanding that books alone cannot provide.

Narrator: Our identity—a complex tapestry woven from our personal history, community values, race, gender, and aspirations—acts as a powerful, often invisible, filter for how we process the world. A rich education, Bogart posits, must be a representative one. If children only see one type of person or one perspective reflected in their books and classrooms, they can develop the mistaken sense that their worldview is the only one that matters.

Author Kwame Alexander’s experience highlights this. Growing up, he rarely saw Black characters in the books at his school library. It was only because his home was filled with books by Black authors that he could imagine a future for himself as a writer. Seeing himself and his experiences reflected in stories was critical to forming his identity and ambition. To become a self-aware critical thinker, one must recognize the pieces of their own identity and understand how those pieces influence the questions they ask, the sources they trust, and the conclusions they draw.

Narrator: The final and most challenging stage of critical thinking is developing intellectual humility—the courage to change your mind. This requires moving beyond a superficial idea of "tolerance" and learning to tolerate our own discomfort when faced with difference. The author shares a personal story of living in Morocco, where her American sensibility was initially outraged by the chaotic, pushy system for hailing a taxi. There was no orderly queue; it was a physical competition.

Her first instinct was to judge the system as "wrong." However, to get anywhere, she had to learn to manage her own feelings of frustration and adapt. She had to tolerate her own discomfort. Over time, she became proficient at navigating the chaos. This experience taught her that true growth doesn't come from condescendingly "tolerating" others, but from the self-awareness to question one's own reactions and adapt. The ultimate goal of critical thinking is not to be right, but to remain open to the possibility that we might be wrong.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Raising Critical Thinkers is that critical thinking is not an external tool for winning arguments, but an internal practice of profound self-awareness. It is the cultivated ability to pause, look inward, and ask: "Why do I believe this? What parts of my identity, my experience, and my community are shaping this conclusion?" It is about understanding that our perspective is just one of many, not the default for all.

The book ultimately challenges us to trade the comfortable illusion of certainty for the richer, more complex rewards of intimacy—with a subject, with another person, and with our own minds. The practical challenge it leaves us with is not simply to teach our children how to spot a logical fallacy, but to model the courage it takes to encounter a world that is far more complicated than we first believed, and to be willing to be changed by it.