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Franklin's Philosophy of Life
in His Own Words

312 Pages $14.95

Essential Thinking Lifeskills

What They Are and Why They are Essential

The Cardinal Character Trait
There are several lifeskills essential in developing the cardinal character trait (the ability to think rightly). Together frame how we look at the world and process information. Our thinking skills frame how we process information while our emotional and social skills frame what we think. You can learn more about our emotional and social skils by going to Emotional-Social Lifeskills.  

Here we want to discuss seven thiinking skills that frame how we process information. Together these emotional, social and thinking skills combine to form the cardinal character trait.

The Need

The greatest handicaps any of us face are internal, not external. They occur in the mind and heart. Anyone who doesn't learn how to recognize and overcome them is highly vulnerable to making poor choices and having bad experiences.

Think of it this way. If you were teaching a course on wilderness survival, you would not only teach your students what they can eat, you would also tell them what they must not, under any circumstances, ever eat. The same is true in helping young people develop their thinking skills. There are mental and emotional traps people continually fall into that ruin their lives. If we can help young people to recognize and avoid these traps it will be one of the greatest services we can provide them.

Grades 2-6

For grades 2-6, faulty thinking practices are characterized as “The Stink’n Think’n Gang”—a band of thieves out to rob us of common sense and good judgment. IWANNIT NOW'S job is to get us to want things that are not good for us, and conversely, not to want things that would be good for us. BIGGS BIGGER makes things seem more important than they relly are while EENCY WEENCY TINY TOO tries to make us think things are less important than they really are. NAME IT BLAME IT tries to pin lables on things t make us believe we really understand them while JUDGE B. FORE attempts to get us to form opinions without adequate infor-mation and LI FIB wants us to tell and believe things that simply aren't true.

Grades 5-9

For grades 5-9, faulty thinking practices are characterized as secret agents of EPT, a clandestine organization out to destroy civilization by flooding the world with error-prone thinking. EPT is led by the sinister twin sisters, ERRONEOUS and EMOTIOUS. ERRONEOUS likes to play games with our minds. Agents reporting to her are PREVARICATOR, a master of deceit and PERVERTER is a specialist in illusion who befogs our thinking by distorting our perceptions of reality. EMOTIOUS capable of blocking out all rational thought by stirring up feelings within us that are so powerful they control our actions. Her agents are POSSESSIT who creates longings and desires that are difficult to deny, PASSIONATA who can turn anger into hate, love into obsession, fear into terror and discouragement into despair, and POLARIZER. If POLARIZER can get people to dislike each other enough, he can get them to destroy each other.

If you doubt the existence, or question the effectiveness, of either the Stink’n Think’n Gang or the agents of EPT, just pick up your daily paper or watch the evening news. You'll see evidence of their handiwork in nearly every story.

These characters are not actually a part of any of the stories or activities in The Seven C’s of Thinking Clearly. But they are used as vehicles for discussion when exploring the lessons to be learned from a story or activity. In addition, they provide valuable learning hooks that help students understand and retain the ideas being taught. Using these characters provides several important benefits.

    1.  It allows teachers and students to explore the thought processes and motivations that
         lead to self-defeating behaviors in fun, objective, and non-threatening ways.

    2.  It helps students understand the connection between thoughts, feelings, choices, and actions.

    3.  It helps students recognize the relevance of ideas being taught.

    4.  It creates an indelible learning experience that can lead to long term retention.

    5.  And it provides a transferable teaching strategy that can be particularly helpful to children in understanding the influences that lead people to injure themselves and others.

The Solution

The Clear Thinking Team
There are seven skills we all use to process information. These faculties give us the ability to reason, make conscious choices and to act upon those choices. The greater our skill level in using these skills tha better we are able to act in a manner that will reliably produce happiness and well-being. They are an essential part of thinking rightly.

Unfortunately, we tend to think of them, if we think of them at all, as attributes that we are endowed with by nature rather than as skills that must be developed. As a result, most of us do very little to conscioully improve our ability to think or reason clearly.

In this condition we become susceptible to faulty thinking. If the most powerful things in the world are ideas, the most empowering thing in the world is to be able to distinguish good ideas from a bad ideas. This is the great advantage young people can derive from making a serious effort to develop the following C skills.

Criticism
The ability to examine, analyze, compare, evaluate, make judgments, and form opinions

Creativity
The ability to imagine, originate, invent, design, and develop new things

Curiosity
The ability to wonder, question, investigate, explore and seek out new information.

Concentration
The ability to pay close attention and stay on task.

Communication
The ability to effectively exchange information with others, especially through reading, writing, speaking and listening.

Correction
The ability to correct errors in one’s own attitudes, beliefs, and actions

Control
The ability to effectively govern one’s own conduct.

By helping young people consciously and deliberately focus on developing these skills, several important benefits can accrue. You will find your students doing things like:

The wonderful thing about teaching the C skills is that virtually everything you do in the classroom offers an opportunity to learn about and practice them. While students already possess these skills to one degree or another, they are typically underdeveloped, unevenly developed, and greatly underutilized. Your primary challenge is to make the learning of them a conscious and determined effort. If you do so, you will find the results most encouraging.