Do you believe everything people tell you? Why or why not?
For instance, when your friend tells you that working as a part-time waiter in a fancy restaurant will get you a lot of money, how would you respond?
No, I will choose the message that I think is reasonable enough or find out the evident before I believe people’s words. Because people tend to be fuelled by public opinion and they will easily lose their own thoughts under the influence of media or biased remark. Thus, establishing independent thinking ability and cultivating the sensitivity to diverse opinions are both important capacity that we have to be equipped with when we are judging things.
If my friend tells me that kind of thing, I would say, “Though earning money is the main purpose of taking part-time, I still want to learn some useful knowledge and make a good use of my profession rather than selling my labor or even my body.”
4 則留言:
I'm quite agree with your opinion especially "people tend to be fuelled by public opinion". Indeed, sometimes people choose to acquire information selectively from the majorities mutural ideas. Can I call it as a kind of peer pressure? Because just like what our ancestors have taught us about the story of "眾口鑠金". Public opinions can confound the wrong thing with the right.People somehow tend to be influenced easily by believing the mutual ideas from majorities. I also agree with you that you say we should establish independent thinking and cultivate sentitivity when we are judging things.For me, except for these two concepts , I also think to have an empathy in mind before judging is important. We have to be considerate and be thoughtful so that we could make objective judgement without personal prejudice.At the same time, if we have empathy in mind, we could view things differently out of our fixed angle. At the end for the task, if my friend tell me about it, I would response him/her that since our identities are still students, we suppose to fulfill our responsibilities by focusing on our studies as the top priority.
As what professor 龍應台 had said, the concept of critical thinking is more than just independent thinking. The most complete idea comes from Dr. King’s remark and that is as follow: it must enable one to sieve the way evident, to sieve truth from the false, the real from the unreal and the fact from the fiction. And before we do the judgment and make decision, we must possess a strong information data as a reference and select the one which is suitable to back up our remarks. During the process of judging, we have to continuously expand our knowledge data base. It will become a circle which can gradually broaden our mind and horizon. Also, as Irene said, sympathy is an important part before judging things. We should be considerate, thoughtful and always stand in other’s shoes. With an empathetic heart, we can view things with different angle and be less harsh. Combining those elements, we can become objective yet critical enough while thinking and judging.
I also quite agree with your opinion about having the ability of thinking critically and independently. It is important to have our own thoughts rather than being persuaded or even misguided by others easily. However, I don’t think that working as a part-time waiter or waitress is only selling our labor, I believe that we can still learn something from being a server. The point is we should know what we are pursuing, money or experience. Also, we should evaluate our ability first, whether we can strike a balance between our school work and the part-time job before deciding to be a server in a fancy restaurant.
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