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There are several important ways that different kinds of thinking grow out of experience. These are important for me to consider as a teacher because I need to make decisions about the role I want to play in a person's experience; my main criteria is how my interaction will affect the way that other person thinks in the future. The ideas provided in this section are basic, but later in part II I will show ways they are compromised. The main issue I deal with here is the role external validation, fantasy, and role modeling have in encouraging thinking, by giving a person the feeling of being valuable for thinking.
There are several uses for critical thinking I have identified (which I refer to simply as thinking), and two kinds of encouragement. The three uses for thinking are thought in the abstract (which may not necessarily have an application), thought which applies to things in the physical world of people and things, and which is linked to action on that world, and thought which is self-reflective. I have found that each of these kinds of thought is a powerful tool for me as a human, that they contribute to one another, but that they are learned separately. The two kinds of encouragement are intended encouragement from an external source, and private fantasy. Both kinds of encouragement can contribute to any of the three kinds of thinking. I think the tendency to use any of these three kinds of thinking is based on whether a person felt valuable for that behavior, as a child or sometime along the line of growing up.
Abstract thought for me is what we might call thinking for its own sake. It doesn't have clear applications at the time that we are engaging in it - like learning math or writing poetry. Sometimes, I have been encouraged to to this. For instance, driving in the car, my father might point to a wagon we were driving by and ask me how much corn I thought it could hold. If I was interested, we would try and figure that out; my enjoyment and feeling valued by him for thinking reinforced this behavior. To this day, I engage in the behavior - thinking through the theories in this paper is one example.
Then there is a habit of thinking about the things that are relevant in the immediate physical world. For instance, if I was raking leaves with my parents and asked ``should I rake this way or that way?'' my mom might have said ``Well, that way is downhill, so it's easier; but that way is uphill, and you might enjoy the challenge. What do you think?'' Part of the encouragement is simply their providing the vocabulary to help me see that there was an opportunity for me to think. Another part of the encouragement is telling me I'd done well, no matter what I'd decided - the criteria for success being applied thinking, not the particular answer.
There is a further habit of thinking where the thinking applies not to action, but to self-knowledge and self-action. This is called (among other things) enlightenment, self-actualization, or individuation. This self-knowledge and self-action is very powerful because it allows a person to choose which of their own habits of thinking to reinforce - and, if they choose, to live increasingly peacefully, productively, and ecstatically under any circumstances. Of course, a person will still be responding to their emotional needs when they choose which habits to reinforce - until they become aware of these particular emotional needs. For me, this kind of thinking has been a real challenge - either because I have only started engaging in it recently, and it is hard to start anything new, or because by its nature, continuous self-examination requires a greater dedication than the other kinds of thinking.
As I have mentioned, external validation is not necessarily needed to develop these habits of thinking. It is also possible to feel valuable for thinking (or any other activity) through fantasy. Many people, including myself, have private fantasies that help them meet their needs to feel worthwhile when they do not get encouragement from others. In a sense, private fantasies allow an individual to self-create the sense of worth that isn't coming from the external world. These fantasies may be accurate (if a person is constantly told, for instance, that thinking for himself will get him nowhere, he might nonetheless have the fantasy that this criticism is incorrect, and that his thinking really will help him live). They might also be inaccurate (for instance, that a child is helping a dead bird will come back to life by writing poems for it). The fantasies may be expressed to the outside world, or they may be kept private. Sometimes these private fantasies are enough to keep someone thinking in a certain way despite lots of external criticism - in fact, sometimes the fantasies even manipulate the criticism to help the individual feel good - though, by and large, it is my observation that encouragement and discouragement are perceived accurately.