When I was a little girl, I used to sit beside my grandmother while she wrote. She always composed her poems and stories by hand, and one of my jobs was to type them for her. As a child, I found this faintly mysterious. Why so much care with words? Why all the effort?
I understand now. For my grandparents, ideas mattered. Thinking mattered. Education mattered. And in their case, critical thinking was not simply an academic skill. It was one of the things that helped save their lives.
My grandfather, whom we called Opa, was a philosopher by avocation. In 1938 (long before I was born), he and my grandmother fled Nazi Germany with their two-year-old son and came to the United States. When I think about their story, I think, of course, about courage. But I also think about judgment.
While recovering from illness in what was then Czechoslovakia, my grandfather spent hours reading foreign newspapers, comparing what they said. He did not comfort himself with the popular assumption that Hitler was all bluster and no real threat. He paid attention. He compared sources. He noticed patterns. He questioned easy optimism. Most importantly, he was willing to face reality as it was, rather than as he wished it to be.
That habit of mind mattered. It helped him recognize danger early enough to act.
Later, it also shaped the kind of person he became in America. When he learned safety standards were being ignored in the factory where he worked, he spoke up. He believed that once you see clearly, you also carry a responsibility to act clearly. Thinking and character were not separate traits for him.
I carry that lesson with me every day in the classroom.
We live in a time when people are bombarded with information, yet often deprived of the time and habits needed to make sense of it. Headlines compete for outrage. Social media rewards speed, certainty and performance more than patience, nuance and truth. Under those conditions, critical thinking is not a luxury. It is a form of protection.
It helps us slow down long enough to ask better questions. What is the evidence? What is being assumed? What has been left out? Those are not merely academic questions. They are civic questions, moral questions and, sometimes, deeply personal questions.
Critical thinking also requires humility, and I learned that in a much smaller but memorable way as a seventh grader. I lost a class election to a girl I had dismissed too quickly. At the time, I was upset. Later, I realized she was actually the better choice. That experience stayed with me because it taught me that thinking well is not just about identifying other people’s errors. Sometimes it means revising your own judgment.
That, to me, is part of what education is for.
Yes, education opens professional doors. Yes, it creates opportunity. But at its best, it does something even more important: it equips people to resist manipulation, to weigh evidence, to question comforting falsehoods and to live by principle when it matters most.
My grandparents arrived in America with very little. But they gave their children and grandchildren something lasting: a reverence for education, a love of learning and a conviction that ideas matter.
That is a gift I have spent my career trying to pass on.
Here on the Virginia Peninsula, we have many good reasons to value education. I would add one more. In ways both dramatic and ordinary, teaching people how to think well may be one of the most important things we ever do. Sometimes, quite literally, critical thinking can save your life.
