Critical Thinking and Society

Critical Thinking and Society
While working at the Texas Workforce Commission we have a goal of achieving self sufficiency for our participants. There was what I called the cookie cutter mentality in which every persons challenge was taken as being the same. We had a participant for the welfare program (TANF) and she was a nursing student at UTEP, she was one semester away from graduating. She was on her tenth month of benefits. Benefits only come for eleven months and you have to reapply. Problem is that if she did that she would have to stop school for a total of two months, look for work, and then be allowed to return to school. She would essentially fail her semester and have to wait for the next semester. I thought that if we as an organization being a liaison to this participant we should have been more creative and allowed her to finish her schooling and get out of the system. Be self sufficient.
Free will is the ability to free oneself from the influences or conditioning of others these can be; people, culture, or society. Though, as Ruggiero, V. R. (2009) indicates “all human action is directed by some sort of conditioning” pg26 it is important to try to think as an individual and be motivated to think things out creatively. Truth is what everyone who has investigates on a thing agrees on as being the truth at that time. This is not saying later or in the future a new fact will become clear either modifying or changing the truth to what it ultimately will become. Knowledge is found by experience, observation, and what others have reported thing to be. All can have faults and all are affected by memories or remembering but knowledge can lead to the truth. Opinion is a personal feeling one has on a subject and can be emotional based on expressions of taste or expressions of judgment.
Hindrances to critical thinking process can take on several forms some of them are: face saving, resistance to change, and stereotyping. Though, all carry different aspects of hindering the critical thinking process some methods of overcoming these hindrances are to keep one’s mind open to new ideas and to be humble not allowing one’s ego to rationalize their thinking in such a way as to become dishonest with others and themselves. To overcome stereotyping avoid generalizations that classify ideas, people, and places according to