Thinking Critically
Frank McCourt
"Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the kings horses, all the kings men, couldn't put Humpty together again." I said what's that about? "Well umm, it's about this egg that fell off the wall." Oh yeah, I said, where does it say egg? "Well it's about an egg." I said where does it say egg? Humpty Dumpty, where does it say egg? Point out to me! Show me! In this rhyme where it says egg. "It's egg, it's egg," and then I have them backed into a corner again, and they're coming out fighting, but they have no weapons. There's no friggin' egg! Where is the egg? Well, how did you arrive at this egg? Who brainwashed you? "Well, I dunno… Oh. It's an illustration." Where'd you see it? "In a book." Oh. Somebody decided it was an egg. Who decided it was an egg? "I dunno, some guy way back there." I said, well, he mislead you. It may or may not be an egg. Some people say it was the Christian Church, you know, splitting up into various schisms and fragments way back during the Reformation. Maybe it was that. "Oh. Oh, really."

John Lovas
The most obvious definition of critical thinking is the ability to go beyond the surface. The ability to go beyond the obvious.

Mike Rose
We go down one street rather than another. We ask this person rather than that person. We pick up the, you know, this particular form at work rather than that form at work. Each and every one of those moments call for a moment, a second, a split second of some kind of decision made, some kind of critical thought, some kind of reflection. All of us are thinking critically all the time.

Lynn Troyka
If I can figure out for each student exactly where that student can be critical and just give that student some material in that field. For example, I have tons of students who can be very critical about sports writing. You give them… I mean, I expose them to some of the stuff and I mentioned for the NY Post vs. the NY Daily News and then even the NY Times has editorials all in it. Is athlete X over the hill or not? Did athlete Y play a good game or not? Should this person have acted up and been suspended or not? These are critical issues that students today in some of my classes are…really, really care about.

Akua Duku Anokye
When I talk about critical thinking, I'm talking about taking an idea, and exposing it from a number of perspectives, and not saying that there's one way of interpreting any piece of text. And by text, it doesn't have to be only written text, of course, it can be text that comes from… it can be film, it could be video, it could be, of course, newspaper, which is written text, but it could be a variety of text. How do you read a situation, how do you read a circumstance, how do you read a relationship that you're involved in? There are all kinds of interpretations of reading. And so when we think about critical thinking, we ask that people expand their ways of knowing, and understand that there's just… there's not just one way of coming at any particular piece of information that we're being exposed to.

Chitra Divakaruni
Critical thinking is when you look at the information available to you, whether it's written or whether it comes to you in verbal form, or as incidence, and you can see past a group of disconnected events or a group of disconnected facts and you see the connections. And you begin to see how things fit together. And you begin to see inner meanings.