About
2020: The Year of Global Irrationality
Someday we will stop talking about the pandemic as the defining event of 2020. Instead, we will look back and marvel at just how deeply the response to the pandemic was corrupted by politicisation, motivated reasoning, arbitrary censorship, and a widespread repudiation of critical thinking.
But public and political discourse have been in steady decline for years now. The pandemic has merely accelerated pre-existing trends. While there are good reasons to think that political irrationality cannot be completely remedied until the underlying political incentives change – that is to say, until our political institutions are fundamentally reformed – we believe that significant improvements can still be made at the margins.
One way of doing this is by promoting critical thinking to its rightful place at the centre of our educational and intellectual culture. With that goal in mind, and having seen no evidence that such a mission is going to arise organically from within our existing educational and political institutions, we have started The Critical Thinking Project.
Our objectives are:
- To advocate for the adoption of Critical Thinking as a standalone, core component of curricula at every level of formal education
- To make high quality, on-demand Critical Thinking lessons and resources available and accessible to as many people globally as possible
- To consistently bring Critical Thinking principles to bear on prevailing political and social disagreements and controversies
- To contribute to the redemption of our public debate and discourse
Elevating the standard of public discourse through free and affordable critical thinking resources
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Meet the Founder
Hugo Newman, PhD in Philosophy
After completing my PhD in Philosophy in 2015, I decided to leave academia behind. In 2017 I co-founded an eLearning company with my brother, Thomas, in the area of financial and accountancy training. I continued publishing articles on political and social philosophy. But I watched with concern as the standards of public discourse seemed to decline preciptiously, especially in the context of online political and cultural debates. I have founded The Critical Thinking Project in the hope of beginning to plug the huge gap in critical thinking awareness and training that persists across nearly all of our educational institutions. The course is simple, comprehensive, affordable, and ideologically neutral. If you would like to join the effort, please get in touch.
Thank you.
Lessons on critical thinking