Why do people turn to crime?

I've often said, to those who would listen to me, that providing someone with the skill of Critical Thinking is a valuable gift.

What is critical thinking?

Some might think that it's the same as common sense. Well, it isn't common sense (the way I think of it). Common sense is an important skill to have, but you can actually learn common sense through life experience and don't require explicit instruction to gain and master it.

For example: Everyone knows that it's dangerous to run with scissors, it's common sense, because we learn through life experience that scissors are sharp and pointy and that running sometimes results in falling down and falling down on sharp pointy things can lead to serious injury. If you ask anyone "do you think it's safe to run with scissors" they will tell you YES. You can even ask them "why" and they'll probably give you an excellent reason.

Now, some people still run with scissors from time to time. This is not because they lack common sense, but because their brain isn't focusing on the fact that what they are doing is dangerous. Maybe they are working on an art project and suddenly the doorbell rings, or the baby is about to put his moist finger in the electric socket. Their brain focuses on the activity of answering the door or removing the baby from danger, forgetting the scissors in the hand.

So it's a bit harder to learn critical thinking as part of critical thinking is to be able to put those common sense issues together at such critical times and, in turn, remembering to put down the scissors. But that's, just a small part of critical thinking. An even bigger part of critical thinking is to absorb information from the world around us and using what we know to decide what to do with it. It's much easier to just absorb things and not think about them. You sort of need to train yourself to be critical about them.

For example: Let's say that you hear the following sentence "Kucinich believes in UFOs". Now, let's assume that you know that the word UFO means UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS. Your first reaction might be "Oh my god, this guy is crazy. He believes in little green men." And most people would just drop it, and move on, forever thinking that Kucinich is one crazy guy. But you could pause, and take an additional 15 seconds to think about what the sentence "Kucinich believes in UFOs" really means.

Based on only this sentence, you could assume Kucinich essentially believes that there are things which fly in the earth's atmostphere which are, at the time of their flight, unidentified. Well, I believe that too. UFOs are sighted all the time. Usually, UFOs are later identified as all sorts of things like whether balloons, toys, military aircraft, civilian aircraft, natural phenomena. Sometimes they aren't identified but, for the most part we assume that just because we can't identify them doesn't mean that they are aliens. So MAYBE Kucinich DOESN'T believe in little green men, but only believes that the military puts secret things in our skies (surely a possibility).

Or maybe he does believe in little green men (I believe that extra-terrestrial life forms, possibly intelligent, exist) AND he believes that they visit earth (I don't believe that they visit earth). Why is that so crazy? Why is that crazier than believing that the earth is only 6000 years old? At least we have concrete evidence that the earth is much older than 6,000 years, but no one seems to be calling Huckabee crazy...

Anyway, my point is that when we hear any kind of serious sentence, especially coming from the news media or people who seem sure of themselves, we should always contemplate it quietly and thoroughly. It should only take a few seconds and that's an important critical thinking skill.

Basically, critical thinking skills involve training your brain to be constantly aware of the world around you (awareness), examine one's (or others') behavior from different perspectives (empathy), and doing intelligent things with the information you gather with all 5 senses (analysis). There's a bit more, but that's the basics.

Typically, you would want to teach critical thinking skills to young people, because it's much more difficult for someone to begin applying critical thinking skills after 20 years of not. And when critical thinking skills are not being applied, they atrophy very quickly.

The world would be a better place if everyone had excellent critical thinking skills. Racism and similar types of bigotry would almost certainly disappear, petty crime would drop drastically, capitalism would be completely transformed (mostly because advertising would become less effective), we'd see much less war, people of different religions would be much more tolerant of each other, etc.

This is why I think education is so important. If we could redesign the curriculum for primary school in this country to focus almost entirely on building critical thinking skills rather than simply teaching subjects like history for history's sake or math for math's sake I feel incredibly confident that we would see amazing improvement in the quality of life of that generation.

For example, 4th grade children should not be taught about the nitrogen cycle over a 40 minute science class through a diagram in their science book with little arrows. Each full day of an entire week should be devoted to this and similar natural cycles. The children should be given the basic tools and appropriate pushes to discover the nitrogen cycle for themselves. Two simple in class science experiments, a fieldtrip to a field or forest, and some explanation and nudging from the teacher should be enough (assuming that 1st-3rd grade were filled with similar exercises, by the time they get to 4th grade, they should be pros at this type of instruction). This experience would last for the rest of the child's life, and they would gain that valuable skill of learning something through experience and experimentation. It sure beats being told something and having to believe that it's true by the teacher's authority.

What would this cost? Teachers would have to be more specialized, so they'll require more schooling and ultimately a much much higher pay. The job of a primary school teacher would need to be revered more than that of a doctor or a scientist, and similarly their pay should be much higher. The major problem now is that too many primary school teachers lack the very skills they should be teaching. Why do I believe this?

Well, when I was a sixth grader I had a history teacher (Mr. Wiggins) who, one day, told us that George Washington had wooden teeth. When I heard this, like the rest of the class, I thought "WOW, gross, weird, ha ha ha." But shortly after, unlike the rest of the class, I thought about it and decided that this probably wasn't true. This is because I knew that most wood expands when wet and shrinks when dry. Life experience should have taught anyone this. So the art of making false teeth out of wood must have been either very complicated, causing the false teeth to be more expensive than ivory or metal ones, OR possibly causing wooden false teeth to be remarkably painful or practically useless and left as an alternative to only the poor (and I knew that Washington was not a poor man). I brought this up to Mr Wiggins and he was not pleased. He argued with me so I dropped it. I did some research at the library (this was before the internet boom) and found out that George Washington's wooden teeth are a myth. I brought this up a few days later (essentially calling Mr Wiggins misinformed at best, a liar at worst, but certainly not so bluntly) and guess what happened? I got punished for it. As far as I know, my entire fifth grade class is currently still misinformed about Georgy's wooden teeth and currently, in some schools, applying critical thinking skills still nets you a detention.

This rant was brought to you by a couple of economist that try to re-analyze why the poor commit more crimes.