Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Raising Critical Thinkers with Julie Bogart

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

In this episode, Sharon chats with Julie Bogart, creator of the award-winning Brave Writer program. Sharon and Julie talk about the benefits of leaving behind our information safety nets–the communities that only reinforce our own opinions–to explore information in new and open ways. Julie emphasizes that the best way to understand and care about each other is to be open to, and become fascinated with, different viewpoints. Being a critical thinker, and raising critical thinkers, does not mean we need to dismiss new technology all-together, but rather, find our “technological optimism.” If we’re going to be critical thinkers, we need to get in the habit of asking questions to understand instead of listening to argue. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Always so delighted to have you here with me. And today I am sharing a conversation with a friend of mine. Her name is Julie Bogart, and she has written a definitive work on raising critical thinkers. So many of you DM me and say, how do I make sure that my kids are good critical thinkers? or how can I improve my own critical thinking? And I really think you're going to get a ton out of this conversation and a ton out of her new book. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. Julie, will you introduce yourself for people who are not familiar with your work yet? Because people need to know about this new book that you've written. They're going to find this

so helpful. Sharon, thank you so much for having me. I feel like we should have been friends for years. I am Julie Bogart. I have five adult children who live all over the globe. I homeschooled them for 17 years. My work has mostly been in the homeschool space, but what we really do in my company, my company is called Brave Rider, is we help parents participate meaningfully in their children's education. So whether your kids are in school or they're hybrid schooled or they're at home, there is a place for you in my company, Brave Writer. And the purpose of our work is to make those connections between what your kids are learning and who they are personally that lead them to having meaningful, well-educated lives. First of all, your brand new book is called Raising Critical Thinkers.

And I have so many people ask me for advice on how do I raise critical thinkers? How even adults are like, how do I become a better critical thinker? And I am so excited to have sort of like the definitive guide to point them to so that people can really get their arms around this topic. One of the things I really like too, is it's very practical. It's very rooted in reality. It's rooted in the realities of parenting. It's not just like a theoretical, like, well, you should do better at those things. You know what I mean? Like sometimes that's, that's how we feel like, Oh, you're right. I should, but how, you know what I mean? So your book gives people the, but how, how to raise children who are better critical thinkers. And so I would love to start

with why did you write this book? What is the genesis behind your work on this book? Well, I think thinking has always been something that's fascinated me. I was a history major and that's very different than being like a math major. I really was interested in themes and perspectives and ideas and how pieces of reality fit together. So that's always been true for me. But what really kicked off my curiosity about what it means to think well was the internet. I was in my mid-30s when the internet opened its doors. I joke that homeschoolers were the first ones to rush through the doors because we were isolated and lonely and we needed help. And so we all got into these chat rooms, these discussion boards. We were a homogeneous group. Most of us were married.

Most of us were similar religious background. Most of us were heterosexual. Most of us were mothers. So you would think there'd just be this amazing amount of agreement between beliefs. And I think we all assumed that that is what we would find. I bet you're ahead of me. That is not what we found. Turns out you can have a bloodbath over oxyclean and breastfeeding and whether to require math pages, let alone the more esoteric topics of Christian theology or science or what about politics. And what we discovered very quickly is that everyone thought that they thought well and the best. And this became a fascination for me. Why are we all so convinced of our own views and so confident that if this other person

would just hear me out, they'd agree with me? What was this drive for agreement? And why couldn't we actually sit in a room and like each other unless we agreed? So that started in the 90s, continued into the 2000s. I went to grad school, graduated in 2007, and this thread just kept growing and changing. And then, of course, raising teenagers is always going to challenge what you think you know about values, paradigms, worldview, opinions, data, why they trust this person that's just a friend over your very carefully vetted information. So that's really why I wrote it. I want us to actually transcend the debate and learn how to

relate to each other, even when we don't agree with one another, which Sharon, that's what you foster in your community. It's one of the reasons we love you so much. Oh, thank you. One of the things that I really enjoyed about this book, by the way, my name is on the back cover. It is. Not the front cover, but I did get a spot on the back cover. It's pretty good.

It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I'll take it. First of all, I love the idea that the internet is what created your need to write this book because that is i mean if that is not the proof right you know before before back in the old days that's right or younger audiences who don't remember let us tell you how it was yeah yeah uh my favorite historic time period of back in the day. Yeah. Back in the day refers to all, all times, 10 years and prior. It was very difficult for an individual to get a

large publisher to agree to publish their book, put it in a library, put it in a bookstore. If they had no credibility, no evidence, no supporting details, no authority to speak on a topic, it was a tremendous hurdle to get your book in there, your work in the hands of the general public. And you needed to be guarded or regarded. I should say you needed to be regarded with a certain degree of credibility. Right. In order for that to happen. And the internet is a wild and wonderful place. I obviously enjoy it greatly, but it also has in some ways democratized the spread of information. You no longer need to be a person with eight degrees to be able to speak on a topic. But on the other hand, it has allowed mis and disinformation to flourish. And it's

literally been like just fertilizing the garden of mis and disinformation to the extent that in some cases it is now what has grown there is now choking out the other more valuable vegetation. That was a very elaborate analogy. It's a good analogy though, because I mean, I love it because really it is. So I was one of, I'm kind of an optimistic type of personality and I am a definite technological optimist like Herman Kahn. I believe that the problems we confront that we create with technology will get solved by our ingenuity with technology. That's how much I double down on optimistic technology.

So when the internet opened its doors, I pictured this like, ah, kumbaya moment. We would all get to know people from around the globe. We'd understand each other. Hate would dissipate, love would bloom. And then it blew up in a sea of trolling pixels. We don't know what to do with all this data and experience and perspective being shouted at us. We don't know how to sort through it. So what we do

is we huddle around our agreement fires. And then we have meetings where we recite our similar beliefs to keep them alive and to feel safe in them. So this is why we end up in these sort of mono channels, because we're looking for the community that will help us feel safe in the world. That is such a powerful way to put that. Our desire for certainty, whether that is cultural or whether that is just human biology, like the way our brain is wired, it is nevertheless very true. One of the ways that I want to celebrate it, I'm a huge fan of certainty and agreement. It's just, it's limited. But here's a great example. The Bengals are the best football team.

Like, I like being around fans. I like being around people who share my enthusiasms and passions. But what's interesting about sports is we actually recognize in fans of other teams, we recognize ourselves in a way that we don't in politics or religion. We say they're worse than me. They're evil. I don't say that about Philadelphia Eagles fans. I just say, oh yeah, you wear a jersey, so do I. I think my team's better. You think your team's better. And we then actually have them play each other. That's why sports, I always say sports are all of the passion, none of the meaning. They're great. It's such a great outlet for this drive for agreement, drive for certainty, fandom.

But when we're talking about things as essential as like, who are we? Where do we come from? How do we live peaceably together? What kind of government should rule us? What we're really asking are these essential questions. And it's my contention that if our solutions don't include everybody, they are just about agreement and shouting down the enemy. We actually have to understand each other well enough to care for one another. And we can only do that if we include more viewpoints in the room. We actually have to create a space that includes perspectives that are uncomfortable if we're ever going to reach any solutions. Otherwise it's just war. So true. It's also true that if we want to grow and if we want to become intellectually mature, we have to have enough distress tolerance to be able to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings of being around disagreement. Yes. I love that you say that

so often when we hear tolerance, we think it's like a beatific condescending position, like I will tolerate you whose behavior I think is wrong, but I'll just let you be in my presence, which is not tolerance. It's what you just said. Tolerance is sitting with self-awareness. What is this trigger in me? Why am I resistant? What is making me uncomfortable? What narrative would I have to give up to accept this other person's experience? What's at stake for them? What's at stake for me? If I welcome this person in my space, what does that say about me? And what is that causing me to believe or feel in my body? And in fact, just pivoting then to the parent-child relationship, so often we're giving dictates to our kids.

We're indoctrinating them into the community logic story of the family. So a great example I like to use is you've got a five-year-old and you're like, time for dinner, wash your hands. Your child's like, I don't want to wash my hands. So what do we say to that child? Do we say, oh, tell me more about that. What about water on your hands don't you like? What other way could we get your hands clean if you don't like water? We don't get curious.

We don't problem solve. We go to indoctrination. We say, there are invisible germs that you cannot see that are sitting on your hands. Water removes them and it keeps you safe. And the child who's five, no way to process that information. So then we just double down on authority. You will wash your hands or you won't eat. This is actually training for not thinking critically. Now I realize we can't have deep curious conversations

about everything all day long, but we can be more interested. We can be more fascinated rather than going into persuasion mode. So when you feel that trigger and you learn to tolerate it, the next step is fascination. It's not persuasion. It's not seeking agreement. You said you have five adult children. I would love to hear more about, do you have any children who, who fundamentally disagree with some of the things that you raised them to believe? And you don't necessarily have to get into what they are, but have you experienced that

as a parent? Oh gosh. Yes. In fact, I love to say, when I speak to parents, just ask yourself this question. How many of your beliefs that you have today align with your parents? So for instance, do you believe the same about parenting, education, sex, politics, and religion as your parents did? So then I remind them that their children will disagree with them at the same rate. Their kids are going to have differences. So one difference that I experienced that I can share with my kids is about midway

through high school, my second child, my daughter, Johanna was 15 or 16. And she started doing research and decided to become vegan. So she got very interested in PETA. She started showing me a lot of videos. And I said, great, let's shop. Let's get you what you need. Let's help you be vegan. And she's like, wait, I showed you the videos. Are you now a vegan? I was like, no, I'm not, which produced profound upset for her.

Like how can I show you this conclusive proof and you remain unmoved which was the beginning of tolerating difference in our family now two more of my kids jumped on her bandwagon and i made a mistake at that point and i share it to help your audience i said to them in my sort of cavalier way, sort of sassafras way, I said, I can't wait to see which one of you is the first one to stop being vegan. Okay. So you can imagine how quickly they doubled down. Oh, we will be vegan forever. So they lived that life, all three of them for quite a while. The rest of us didn't. At one point, one of them moved and did an exchange program and they were living in a home and felt they couldn't continue or it

would dishonor the people feeding them. Another one traveled around the world. She started eating differently. And the third one eventually became vegetarian instead of vegan. And today, one of them is reverted back to vegan. So and he's like 30. And then one of them 32. And one of them is 25. I share that with you, because what I had to learn was to be more impressed with the process of thinking that led them to put their beliefs into practice, then what the belief actually was, whether it aligned with mine or not. I also think it's a tremendous growth opportunity for parents that when you are having your own beliefs challenged that you have, again, because we all like to think we are the correct thinkers.

I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! In the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. One of the sort of daring theses of my book is that school testing has led us to the misunderstanding that there is a single right answer for every question, and if we just assert it, everyone will know it's true. I mean, think about your classic multiple choice test in school. There

are right and wrong answers. And you are graded not based on how nuanced your thinking is about any of those possible choices. You are graded based on whether you could guess what the test maker had in mind, which drove me crazy as a writer. But if you are under the impression that a single authority can provide a right answer, and if we give it to the world, they will all see it and agree, that creates a very zero sum game in social media. Not only that, testing is timed pressure. You're not allowed to stop the test and say, wow, this provoked a line of thought I hadn't

considered. I'd like to do more research. No, you feel pressure to reduce all of that complexity to one single idea. And so I think on social media, it feels like a multiple choice test all the time. We have an instant box. It's scrolling away. We've got to answer it right now. We've got a thumbs up or thumbs down. And it doesn't really provide space for reflection and ongoing discourse. We did not have those before everyone was literate, by the way. I mean, you could go into meditation or some of the arts, but the majority of the way that we survived was through hyper attention states, being vigilant for the grunt of a warthog or the

downtick in temperature, right? But at the time that reading came into being, we had societies where there was some measure of safety. You could go to a library or a monastery or a university or a church and feel relatively safe. You could open a book and read and allow your mind to do what I call the great divide. You can retain your identity over here while opening the other half of your mind to hearing about the ideas from someone else. Just reading them wasn't voting the way it is today on social media. It wasn't voting. It was here are ideas to consider while I stay the person I am. Today, with the cell phone and the advent of the internet and social media added back to our lives in this way, hyper attention is back with a vengeance.

The dings, the red dots, the like counts all function to distract us. And we feel called on to react quickly and with agility and certainty to protect ourselves. And so we really, with our children, want to get back to cultivating deep reading, which means without distraction for 15, 20 minutes a day, similar to the way we compensated when we brought cars in, stopped walking, and now we exercise. So it's not something we have to get rid of. We don't have to blame cell phones, but we do have to exercise our brains in this deep state because that's where the interconnections come, where the revision of thinking happens, where we create our own architecture of related ideas. And that's sort of the soil from which critical thinking can grow.

I love that. I love that because it's not practical to just tell people, it's not practical to just tell people, stop using technology. Just stop it. No. You know what I mean? Just like it's not practical to say, well, stop driving cars. Right. Just stop doing that. Just so that you can walk more. Marianne Wolf, who's a reading expert, talks about that. She says, you know, some things require that hyper-focus like reading a map, reading an email. You can have multiple distractions going on, but when you're doing sort of depth reading,

the kind that requires you to set aside some of your assumptions or explore the nuances of an idea, deep reading helps. And knowing that you have that tool in your toolkit is what helps. Now, I am from the pre-internet era. I was in my late 30s when it came around. So I have memories of what it's like to just be lost in a book or to do research in a library for hours. We can help our kids learn to do that. We can take phones and put them in a basket. Literally, they need to be in a different room according to the data. The research shows if it's even in the same room, your mind goes to it.

So put it upstairs, stick it in a basket, set the timer and start with five or seven minutes a day and have the whole family do it. Because if you just tell the child to, that's not fun. That's like having to exercise in your basement by yourself. Join a class, be in a team, do a sport, right? Yeah. It's viewed as a punishment of like, you're going to read now while the rest of us are on TikTok. Exactly. Oh my gosh. And it's okay to read online too. I'm

not against that. One of my greatest joys with my teenagers is we'd have the TV on. So we were a techie family. Eventually we didn't start out that way, but we ended that way. The TV would be on, we'd all be on our devices and we would be instant messaging each other in the same room. So like there's humor. What I love about today's writers, kids who are really unharnessed on the internet are the best writers. They know how to get the audience attention. So when they go to write essays, they are so fresh. They have so many ways to hook the reader. So don't be afraid of that stuff, but integrate it. I love that. It's not an either or it can be both. Right. You don't want to raise

kids who are digitally illiterate because that's not going to serve them when they go to college or get a job or, you know, like that's not how the world works anymore. Just like you don't want to raise a child who can't take a bus or drive a car. That's right. To get around, you need to learn how this works. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Uh, that is fun. You're absolutely right though, that I, this is something that, you know, there's always this older generations are always like, Oh, kids these days, you know, they're just listening to trashy music and trashy clothes and they have trashy ideas. I actually feel tremendously optimistic about Gen Z. I do too. I think they are fantastic. I think they're hilarious. They're going to be the group that invents the technology that solves our problems with technology. Exactly. So back in college, I went to UCLA, probably what would seem like the dark ages

to your audience, 79 to 83. And I took this class called Geography 5, and it was all about the environment. Now, a lot of us talk about climate change today. They were talking about this in the 60s and 70s, like a ton. So I'm in this class, and it was the limits to growth model versus technological optimism. The limits to growth model was like, pick up your trash in the park, use non-aerosol hairspray. The world needs fewer people, so don't have babies. It was very much like, we're going to run out, protect what we have. And all I could think was that's the shaming model. The shaming model never works. Like no matter how, I mean, this is how I thought at the time.

I thought, I don't see how this is going to work. Then I read Herman Kahn. Now you have to remember, this is all before the internet, computers, personal computers, any of it. And he basically was dealing with the problem of cars and exhaust. That was their chief thing. I lived in LA, there were smog alerts all the time. And so he started like fantasizing about what could solve it if somebody could figure it out. And it all sounds like sci-fi movie stuff to me now. But at the time when I was reading him, I thought what I love is this belief that we can both progress

and solve problems simultaneously, that we aren't having to choose sides. And I would say that if we're talking about critical thinking, that really is the heart of this. We aren't trying to always choose sides. I remember hearing Adam Grant, actually, someone I really love and that you respect so well and know, talk about thinking like a scientist, like wanting to get it right. And I spent time really reflecting on that because I know that it's better to get it right than to just, quote, be right. But I also know that sometimes we can't even get enough data to get it right. We're like choosing between things that we don't know enough about to vote on. So I reduced it from getting it right to just getting it. Can we just get it? Can we at least give the other side the floor long enough to get why their

argument logically coheres for them? We don't have to agree or disagree yet. We're just like, oh, so the limits to growth model is making us value resources. Like we better care about resources. Technological optimism is asking us to believe in human ingenuity. Okay. That's what's animating these two arguments. Gosh, they both seem to be saying important things. Maybe we should keep both of them. So that's kind of what I think about when I think about critical thinking. Can you get it? Allow yourself not to agree or disagree. Just did you get it? Did you ask questions to understand instead of just listening to argue? Right.

Why limits to growth model is a bad idea. Right. Right. Exactly. And not needing to shout down the opposition all the time. What would you say to people who feel like a lot of what we disagree on are moral imperatives? We're not just, you know, discussing two legitimate ideas. Yes. We're talking about one of them is like a dictator and one is, you know, a democracy. How do we, how do we reconcile that?

I love that question so much. And I think that's what attracted me to your work because I loved how able you were to state things clearly without being polemical. I think that's part of the danger of our current setting is that everybody is ideologically driven. They're rhetorically driven. They are not actually looking at the principles that animate their thinking. So I'm going to give you a story because it goes to the heart of what you're saying. I got in a debate years ago at a table of adults. It started with three women and five men. Quickly, the other two women left, so it was me and five dudes. And they started accusing me of being a political certain perspective. I'm not going to say which one, right? On one side of the political aisle.

And I came back and I said, I understand where you're coming from. I've held some of those beliefs. This is just where I am right now, but I'm constantly in revision because I'm learning all the time. And he said, here's what I think. I would like to start a benevolent dictatorship with my ideas, because if I could just make everyone live them, they would see they are so superior. Eventually, they would be glad we did that. And I said, do you hear yourself? You're so convinced that you are willing to violate the principles you want me to adopt by dictating. Like that is hilarious to me. Ah, the benevolent dictators. Ah, the benevolent dictators that I want to trust. So I think when we are in the idea arena, and actually, Sharon, I took this from one of your workshops. I attended your gun control workshop, which was phenomenal. If people haven't listened to it, go buy it, go listen. So while I was writing my book, I started thinking, Sharon, about how schools set up debates. Like, okay,

10th grade class, who's for gun control? Go over here. Who's against? Okay, get your ideas together and then we'll debate. Debate is not helpful. Debate is a way of reinforcing your own beliefs and vilifying the other. What I really think would be cool in a class

is to have everyone raise their hand who has direct experience with the topic of guns. So you might have someone who's lost a family member to a shooting, someone else whose dad is a police officer, someone else who's been saved by a security guard using a gun, someone else who's from generations of hunters. Get all those experiences and then divide those into two sides and the rest of the class random. And then give them a set of interesting questions to discuss, take notes, create new questions, identify what's at stake, and then come back and have the two groups share those.

And at the end ask, what do we need to talk about to account for all these experiences to take all these people into consideration what happens when you're talking about like tyranny or like january 6 there's some of these others they're not taking everyone into consideration they are fundamentally focused on one vision that they want to enforce on everyone. And that just doesn't actually achieve the goal they think they have. It doesn't allow us to get to know the contours of being human or American. Have you read John Rawls' Justice as Fairness? He talks about the difference between individual rights and community values and

how we are negotiating those in every court case, every Supreme Court case. And I think that piece is what's missing in some of these conversations. We're not able to identify which parts are for the individual, which parts are for the community and how those are in conflict. So that's where I would start. Like even with something as significant as abortion, I remember reading, you know, I was on one side of the debate and had only ever read that side and the way they characterize the other side. And at a point in my life, I realized I need to let the other side tell me why they think they have the moral position because I think they don't. And by doing that, I actually started to understand what the argument was actually about. It wasn't about what I thought it was. It was about something else. And that's

what I think you do really well, helping us see that. Thank you. I always say that if you cannot articulate another side's position to the extent that they would say, that's correct. That is what I believe. Then you don't understand it well enough. Agreed. If you can only articulate their position from the viewpoint of your side. Yep.

You know what I mean? Exactly like what you were saying about a topic like abortion. If you are on this side and your only knowledge of the other side is what they have told you around your campfire, when you recite your mantra, then you don't understand what's happening at that other campfire over there. That's right. And a lot of times there are two very different things at stake. So you think you're arguing over the same thing and you actually are not. That's right. That's right. And understanding where that other

side is coming from does not mean at the end of the day that you have to agree with it. That's right. But it might mean you have to account for it. And I think that's the piece we don't want to do. We want to either persuade them or extinguish them instead of dealing with the mess that this group brings into my campfire. Changing gears just a little bit. Can you give maybe parents who have young children or maybe elementary school children, can you give anybody who's listening like just a little taste of what is something they could be doing to foster critical thinking in their children? So we raise a generation who values the work of thinking deeply about things. Oh my gosh. So great. Cause I love the little kid side of all of this. So one of the key ways that we grow as thinkers is we

become keen observers. We actually grow a vocabulary around whatever the topic is, and we get more intimate with it. I always say that we are not going for certainty. We are going for intimacy. That's what we want. We want intimacy with a subject or with a topic or with whatever. Children are great explorers. They use their imaginations. They like dress up clothes. They like to pretend to be a dog and eat from the bowl on the floor. So one of the ways we can help them is help them have more awareness of what's going on

in themselves when they read or think or play a game or participate. what's going on in themselves when they read or think or play a game or participate. One activity I love to do is I love to have kids take an item in your house, like a pine cone or a cup of hot chocolate, and walk them through the five senses, but in a really detailed way. So like, hold that pine cone up to the light, look at it from the top, look at it from the bottom, try and identify what color it is using Crayola crayons and giving that brown a different name. Is it only brown? What does it feel like if you rub it on a cheek? Ouch. What other associations do we have with pine cones? And you can even take those kinds of things further. Like, who do you imagine has never seen a pine cone? What do you think a dog's perspective

of a pine cone is? So what you're doing is you are broadening the conversation around something they take for granted and helping them experience it through multiple lenses, eyes, nose, mouth, fingers, ears. That's where we start. And those senses, the bodily senses do still govern us even as adults. We are reactive based on those sensory observations. So that's a great place to start is just, and I give you like more questions than you ever wanted to use to help draw those kinds of ideas out. Critical thinking also shows up in board games and video games and card games. And honestly, play them with your kids. Don't see them as entertainment that they do on their own. Be there. Discover what it's like to lose a game. Break the rules. One of my favorite things to do is to say, okay,

let's play basketball and change all the point values for every shot and see what that feels like. Play a game and deliberately change one of the rules and see how that impacts strategy, outcome, logic. These are ways that we start provoking thinking in our children. I love that. I change the rules of board games all the time. I think that's hilarious. I do. My daughter and I, she's nine. She really likes to play this game.

Guess who? Do you? Oh, I love that game. Yeah. Where it's like the little, little pictures of people that you flip up and down and you try to guess who the other person has, you know, and you do that by asking yes and no questions. Does the person have blue eyes? Do they have long hair, et cetera. And it has just gotten too easy. You know what I mean? So we have to make it harder. And so now we have an ever

growing list of things you're not allowed to ask. You're not allowed to ask about their, their gender. You cannot ask if they are elderly or not. You can't ask if they have long hair. I remember reading a book years ago that was by a Chinese writer. And the Chinese writer was being interviewed after they had written this book. And she actually made the statement, Americans are not very observant. And it's because they rely on hair and eye color for everything. She's like, in China, when we describe someone, we say he has a flat nose. She has high cheekbones. Her eyebrows are close together. She wears her hair in this style. And I was like, oh my gosh, isn't that interesting? And then I remember learning, I had a roommate studying

Japanese. And in Japanese, like if you're holding up like a cup, when you describe whether it's big or small, you're also saying if it's cylindrical or if it's angular or if it's got a top and a bottom. And I was like, that is some detailed describing going on there. So one of the things Americans are good at is shorthand, but encouraging us to see more than we expect to see is a great way to start realizing there's always more to know than I actually can know at first glance, no matter what that is. I love that. I love that game. It's a fun one. It is a fun game. I also love the idea too, that you can incorporate a lot of the techniques that you have, that you have in your book, Raising Critical Thinkers. You can incorporate them into your everyday family lives. That's right. It is not about like, buy this curriculum and devote two hours a day to worksheets and then your children will solve for X. Nope. Nothing like that. Yeah, no, absolutely not. And in fact, some of what I really encourage

is like there's this one part of what I try to teach that the way we learn is through reading, experiencing and encountering. Reading is safe, barring a paper cut, right? Or, you know, a short in your Kindle. You get to decide whether or not you agree, disagree, whether or not the information is relevant. But when we go into an experience, we learn with more of ourselves. We're not just in a two-dimensional under our control

kind of learning environment. You can read about a violin, but if you've never heard it played, you can't say you know a violin. And an encounter is when you destabilize the power differential. So it's one thing for me to go to a symphony and listen to a violin and say, oh, she was really good. Oh, he was really bad. But if you put the violin in my hand, I have a whole different relationship to violin now. And I suddenly appreciate and know what makes it difficult, why that one performer was great and why the other one might not have been as good, and my own limits and barriers to understanding. a reading, great. Enrich your children's lives with experiences and then have them meet people and have experiences that are destabilizing, things that make them feel knocked off of their power center. Travel, live in another culture, visit Little Saigon in Los Angeles, learn how to computer program, do things that feel destabilizing

because you'll grow your mind and you can support your kids in those experiences. And destabilizing doesn't have a negative connotation in this situation. It doesn't to me. Yeah. It's still a safe experience. It's just outside of their currently held knowing or certainty. Yes. Or comfort zone. What's comfortable. That's right. Yes.

Like we think of destabilization as like what Vladimir Putin is trying to do to Ukraine. Right? No, we don't mean that. We do not mean that. It just means, yes, moving outside what they already know. That's right. Their existing already know. That's right. Existing comfort zone. That's right. Where you have to draw on resources. You know, when I think of the difference between when I traveled to Morocco to see if I wanted to live there, I was staying in hotels. Most of the experiences were designed for tourists. It was still very exotic and different

for me. I still loved it. I learned a lot. But then when I moved there, oh, that was an encounter. Now I've got to like learn the language, learn to cook, make friends. So encounter just ups the stakes. That's what it does. Yeah. Well, this has been absolutely fantastic. I think every parent who wants to raise critical thinkers, or even if you are like, how can I improve my own critical thinking? This is a book that you will find valuable. It's called Raising Critical Thinkers. It's by Julie Bogart. What day does it come out again? It comes out on February 1st. And I've actually got a free book club guide you can download if you go to raisingcriticalriticalThinkers.com

because I'm hoping people will like talk about this in a group and actually brave the conversations that will flow from some of this reflecting. I love that. And where can people find you online? You can find me on Instagram at JulieBraveWriter. And then my company is BraveWriter.com. There is a seven-day writing blitz that you can download for free. It starts with day one is graffiti. So make sure you're ready for that. Letting your kids write on your walls, perhaps. But the idea is to help you experience and encounter writing in a brand new way that gets it off the table, off of paper and into self-expression and deeper confidence. So bravewriter.com, raisingcriticalthinkers.com are the two places. Julie, this has been so wonderful. You're just a gem of a human. Thank you so much for doing this.

Thank you. I love your work, governered here. And I just am really appreciative that someone like you has captured our imaginations. I think that you are very much a person whose time has come, and I'm grateful for you. Thank you. Thank you, Julie. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or a review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon

McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.