Critical thinking for environmental health risk education

Abstract

This article proposes an approach for helping school-age children to think critically about environmental health risks. It discusses three key elements of a school curriculum--defining a decision perspective, making choices under uncertainty, and thinking about consequences--and recommends procedures to aid in classroom implementation of the proposed ideas. Critical thinking skills are shown to enhance childrens' ability to anticipate the health or safety consequences of a decision by distinguishing automatic from decision thinking, by detecting inconsistent objectives or neglected consequences, and by making explicit value-based tradeoffs. Training in critical thinking also should empower children because it acknowledges the power of personal initiatives in decreasing health risks and, in general, because it focuses the classroom experience on learning about how to think rather than merely learning about what to think.