Meeting the Challenges
To evaluate the truthfulness and the value of a particular piece of information you come across, you should ask yourself three things:
The type of critical thinking described above is especially important for present and future leaders because they will be the ones making decisions about how to deal with the challenges laid out in the previous section. They will have to learn as much as they can about each challenge and confront it with clear, unbiased, and critical eyes. But because those challenges and how they are dealt with will affect every living thing on this planet in some way, directly or indirectly, it is important that the citizens of tomorrow, who will empower the leaders in one way or another, do so as well. And both the leaders and the citizens of the future must do this with empathy for others, understanding that their decisions have implications for the larger world beyond their own community. The decisions they make tomorrow – and the decisions we make today – will determine what kind of future we and our descendants can look forward to.
On the following pages, we present a vision for a program that we believe will help to ensure that the young people of today – the leaders and citizens of tomorrow – will have the love of learning and the critical thinking skills to be up to the daunting task outlined above. It starts with the Jacksonville Joe Berg Seminars, an evening seminar program for gifted high school students that has been in operation in Jacksonville since 1960, when local businesspeople and school officials established it based on a model spread around the country by the Joe Berg Foundation.
- Does the information make sense?
- Does the information fit with other things you know?
- Does the source of the information have reason to want to mislead you?
The type of critical thinking described above is especially important for present and future leaders because they will be the ones making decisions about how to deal with the challenges laid out in the previous section. They will have to learn as much as they can about each challenge and confront it with clear, unbiased, and critical eyes. But because those challenges and how they are dealt with will affect every living thing on this planet in some way, directly or indirectly, it is important that the citizens of tomorrow, who will empower the leaders in one way or another, do so as well. And both the leaders and the citizens of the future must do this with empathy for others, understanding that their decisions have implications for the larger world beyond their own community. The decisions they make tomorrow – and the decisions we make today – will determine what kind of future we and our descendants can look forward to.
On the following pages, we present a vision for a program that we believe will help to ensure that the young people of today – the leaders and citizens of tomorrow – will have the love of learning and the critical thinking skills to be up to the daunting task outlined above. It starts with the Jacksonville Joe Berg Seminars, an evening seminar program for gifted high school students that has been in operation in Jacksonville since 1960, when local businesspeople and school officials established it based on a model spread around the country by the Joe Berg Foundation.