It's my Mind - Learning to Think for an Open Society

Children today grow up in an environment where information is available at all times yet is often unreliable. They encounter contradictory statements, oversimplified narratives, emotionally charged debates and deliberate disinformation.

Greater clarity does not automatically result from even more information. Research shows that the central challenge here is not so much a lack of knowledge as an inadequate ability to deal with uncertainty: decisions are often made too hastily, rather than weighing up alternatives, examining justifications and consciously incorporating remaining uncertainty (Rauscher & Badenhorst, 2021).

Objective

This is where the educational project “Mein Kopf gehört mir” comes in: the aim is to empower children from an early age, on the one hand, to independently verify information, develop well-founded assessments and derive responsible decisions and actions from them – and, on the other hand, to consider alternative perspectives and systematically compare them.

The project aims to explicitly foster not only critical thinking skills, but also the willingness to apply them, for example by cultivating curiosity and encouraging exploratory learning behaviour.

Furthermore, the project aims to provide impetus for education policy to strengthen a democratic, open society. To this end, the project aims to establish universally applicable, ideologically neutral philosophy and ethics lessons that enable children and young people to develop their own world view.

The project focuses on four key competencies:

1. Understanding and evaluating statements – i.e. being able to distinguish between observation, interpretation and evaluation, avoiding hasty conclusions and specifically asking for reasons and evidence.

2. Fact-based thinking and decision-making – i.e. formulating simple if-then hypotheses and applying testing strategies, as well as dealing with open-ended problems without clear-cut solutions.

3. Dialogic thinking and reasoned argumentation – i.e. justifying one’s own positions in discussions and being prepared to reconsider them, as well as responding to others’ contributions.

4. Understanding diversity of perspectives – i.e. recognising different viewpoints and weighing them up against one another without oversimplifying, discussing respectfully and questioning sweeping prejudices.

These skills are closely interlinked and form the basis for navigating a complex world – particularly where simple answers seem especially tempting. Those who have learnt to tolerate nuance, examine justifications and shift perspectives are less susceptible to simplistic worldviews, sweeping generalisations or ideological co-optation.

Implementation and current status

The project does not view critical thinking as abstract theoretical instruction, but as concrete practice. In the classroom, this means that pupils learn to observe, justify, question and examine specific things, to shift perspectives and to reflect together. The aim is to systematically integrate these forms of thinking and discussion into everyday school life.

‘My Mind Belongs to Me’ is a project initiated by the Giordano Bruno Foundation and the Hans Albert Institute, which is being developed and implemented in collaboration with Scientific Temper.

The programme is currently in the conceptual development phase for primary and lower secondary school levels, specifically for the 8 to 12 age group. The content is designed as a modular system, providing teachers with flexible units that can be linked to existing curriculum content without necessarily requiring a separate subject.

By the end of the year, the plan is to finalise the first materials in a practical format and make them available on a website set up specifically for the project. There are also plans to extend the programme to other age groups in the future.

Reference

Rauscher, W., & Badenhorst, H. (2021). Thinking critically about critical thinking dispositions in technology education. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 31, 465–488. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-020-09564-3