Welcome to the Critical Thinking Course!
This course was created by Machiko Osawa and Robert McMillan who have a combined 70 years of experience teaching critical thinking to Japanese students.
Critical thinking is a process of analysis used in the West to make good decisions. However, most people in the West have trouble even defining critical thinking. They’ll say it’s about, “asking questions”, “critiquing ideas” or “being sceptical”. Critical thinking is ingrained in their brains, even though there is no formal tradition of teaching it. Westerners can’t even understand how someone can not use critical thinking.
When we first created a course in critical thinking, we couldn’t find any existing curriculum. We found hints in some of the courses we’ve studied ourselves. Machiko leveraged ideas through the study of Brain Psychology (University of British Columbia), Neuroscience (Harvard University), Logic and Argument, Philosophy and Education Psychology through a U.S. graduate school. Robert, a UX English co-administrator, applied his background in Math, Logic and Computer Science (MIT, University of Toronto).
For more education background: Machiko has a degree in linguistics and Robert a mathematics degree.
Both of us love to learn and to help encourage learning in others!