Think It Over

This summer I’m spending some time with the titles for parents…that you won’t find in the Parenting section. You can see the full list in our Mended Wood Library Guide.

“When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.”

That quote sounds as though it was written last week. After all, we live in an age of “information”—anyone can find supposed facts about any topic at any time, thanks to the democracy of the internet.

However, the quote above was written in 1920 by T. S. Eliot (in “The Perfect Critic”). So it would seem that this might be a human problem, not an internet problem.

Alan Jacobs’ book How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds features this quote in the introduction. Jacobs teaches in the honors program at Baylor University. He also wrote, among other books, Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind and one of my favorite biographies of C. S. Lewis, The Narnian.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

How to Think covers…just that: our habits, both good and bad, of thinking. It’s clear that Jacobs is aware of his own vulnerability to these forces at work in all of us. But he soldiers on, confessing at times, for the good of the world, beginning with our relationships in our own communities. In our internet age, Jacobs says, “…I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience.” (p. 27)

Why This Book is Good for Parents

I think parents can be helped by this book in a few ways:

1. Any encouragement to slow down and take a minute to think is much needed in our day and age. Insert pre-teens or teenagers into the mix, and you can multiply that need by ten or a hundred. Parents need to pause and think before reacting, both on social media and in personal relationships.
2. We are well-served by this book in helping our kids to think better, ask good questions, and recognize our own human tendencies towards laziness of thought. Better thinkers are more considerate of their neighbors, be they across the street…or down the hall…or (gasp) our own parents.
3. The book ends with a nice little checklist (you can see it right here!) that encourages good thinking habits.

(Some of the above links are affiliate links.)

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Kelly Keller

Kelly Keller is the managing editor of Story Warren. She has her BS in Elementary Education from Messiah University and has taught various ages, but her favorite was worldview and literature with high school students. The “gap” in her resume is actually a window of eighteen years of homeschooling, which she recommends as an effective, though demanding, way of expanding one’s home library.

When she’s not behind her laptop, Kelly enjoys live music, baseball, reading great books, and traveling with her husband, David. Kelly hails from beautiful snowy New England, but after two decades in North Carolina, she feels right at home.

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