From Goodreads: In "Think!," award-winning author LeGault refutes the 2005 bestseller "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thought" and describes an intellectual crisis in our country, the factors that created it, and why thinking is relevant to everyday lives, jobs, and quality of life.
My Thoughts: The main premise of this book is that critical thinking is declining and how important is for people to use reason to make decisions as opposed to just making snap decisions. He stressed the importance of looking at problems from all angles and thinking about all aspects of the problem before making a decision. LeGault spoke extensively about how politics, the media and culture in the United States have turned intellectualism and critical thinking into negative things. I found a lot of his assertions to be spot on; he talks a lot about millenials which include students in high school and college and their relationship with teachers and parent and the things he says are so true. I work in higher education and I found myself nodding along to some of the things he was saying as they are things I deal with on a daily basis. He discusses things like how students would rather have someone hold their hand through everything as opposed to going and finding information for themselves and how students don't want to deal with the consequences of their actions and expect people to clean up their messes. I know that not all students are like this but a good amount are
I know that some of what LeGault discusses as causes for the lack of critical thinking in this country are controversial (overmedicating children, overly permissive parents, etc) but I couldn't help but agree with him on a lot of these issues. Parts of the book seemed unnecessary, there is a whole chapter about famous thinkers which included mini-bios of people like Einstein and Edison. It was really boring and seemed really out of place. I also thought it was interesting that a lot of reviews that I have read called this book 'too conservative'. This surprised me because I don't consider myself to be 'conservative' and yet I found myself agreeing with a lot of what he said. Overall, I found this be a pretty fascinating read. 3 stars.
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