Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

But the truth is that without special training, our species is inherently gullible. Children are born into a world of "revealed truths," where they tend to accept what they are told as gospel truth. It takes work to get children to understand that often multiple opin

* Another study, conducted before the Web existed as such, pointed in the same direction. Educational psychologist David Perkins asked people with a high school or college education to evaluate social and political questions, such as "Does violence on television significantly increase the likelihood of violence in real life?" or "Would restoring the military draft significantly increase America's ability to influence world events?"; responses were evaluated in terms of their sophistication. How many times did people consider objections to their own arguments? How many different lines of argument did people consider? How well could people justify their main arguments? Most subjects settled for simplistic answers no matter how much the experimenters tried to push them — and the amount of education people had made surprisingly little difference. As Perkins put it, "Present educational practices do little to foster the development of informal reasoning skills."

ions exist and that not everything they hear is true; it requires even more effort to get them to learn to evaluate conflicting evidence. Scientific reasoning is not something most people pick up naturally or automatically.

And, for that matter, we are not born knowing much about the inner operations of our brain and mind, least of all about our cognitive vulnerabilities. Scientists didn't even determine with certainty that the brain was the source of thinking until the seventeenth century. (Aristotle, for one, thought the purpose of the brain was to cool the blood, inferring this backward from the fact that large-brain humans were less "hot-blooded" than other creatures.) Without lessons, we are in no better position to understand how our mind works than how our digestive system works. Most us were never taught how to take notes, how to evaluate evidence, or what human beings are (and are not) naturally good at. Some people figure these things out on their own; some never do. I cannot recall a single high school class on informal argument, how to spot fallacies, or how to interpret statistics; it wasn't until college that anybody explained to me the relation between causation and correlation.

But that doesn't mean we couldn't teach such things. Studies in teaching so-called critical thinking skills are showing increasingly promising results, with lasting effects that can make a difference. Among the most impressive is a recent study founded on a curriculum known as "Philosophy for Children," which, as its name suggests, revolves around getting children to think about — and discuss

— philosophy. Not Plato and Aristotle, mind you, but stories written for children that are explicitly aimed at engaging children in philosophical issues. The central book in the curriculum, Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery (no relation to Harry Potter), begins with a section in which the eponymous Harry is asked to write an essay called "The Most Interesting Thing in the World." Harry, a boy after my own heart, chooses to write his on thinking: "To me, the most interesting thing in the whole world is thinking. I know that lots of other things are also very important and wonderful, like electricity, and magnetism and gravitation. But although we understand them, they can't understand us. So thinking must be something very special."

BCids of ages 10-12 who were exposed to a version of this curriculum for 16 months, for just an hour a week, showed significant gains in verbal intelligence, nonverbal intelligence, self-confidence, and independence.