In our short tenure on the planet Earth, humanity has accomplished many notable things. We have sent spacecraft to the outer planets, split the atom, and, through millennia of innovations in agriculture, medicine, and engineering, risen to the top of the food chain.

But now, as we enter the 21st century, we have encountered an ironic twist. Despite the advance of scientific understanding, great numbers of us choose to turn our backs on science.

As diseases are successfully treated and even eradicated by scientific medicine, a large alternative medicine movement has arisen, advocating pseudoscientific cures that are not only inferior in effectiveness but in some cases dangerous.

Our culture harbors many other popular ideas that fly in the face of what scientific proof. Past-life regression, young-earth creationism, best-selling books such as the The Secret, and Qi Gong owe their success to simple propaganda or sophisticated marketing sophistry. They would never attract believers if not for the persistent human weakness for uncritical, “magical” thinking.

Notions that mere thought can affect reality or that water has the ability to remember where it has been, are the opposite of the realism that helps us successfully manage life in the physical world. Mystical gullibility may serve the needs of patent-medicine dealers, but it works against our progress as a people. It befuddles our long-term thinking, lubricates poor decision making and undermines clarity at critical moments. Even for those who avoid the health-threatening dangers of quack medicine, thinking magically rather than critically leads to fundamental misinterpretations that all too often guarantee failure.

Even though critical thinking is a key component to making smart and reasoned decisions, many  students graduate from universities without attending a single lecture about critical thinking. If we are to advance and maintain our economic power and public health, this must change.

To be honest, there has been little research done into the prevalence and effectiveness of critical thinking education. While many universities and education programs make it a top priority, the phrase can seem more like a buzzword to the administrators. There was one survey of California university faculty, which found that 77% of those surveyed had little, limited, or no conception of how to integrate critical thinking into content coverage, while only 9% acknowledged an increasing need for critical thinking in our world. But the indirect effects of good critical thinking ain our modern world are obvious: Science, and all the great technological steps forward in the past few centuries.

We are born with the ability of rational thought, but not necessarily with the tendency to use it.   It must be cultivated in students as part of the ongoing process of education, beginning  on the first day of the first grade and continuing through university graduation and beyond.

An important function of schooling is to civilize the student, to help him become less like a savage and more like a member of an organized society. Despite the sentiments of many younger students, this civilizing process is not like the breaking of a horse or a blotting out of individuality, but something almost the opposite. To become civilized is to learn to think, to internalize methods of true understanding, to make contact with existence as it really is—all of which in turn gives the student the freedom to make decisions based on the best available facts.

Critical thinking is a skill that unbinds the mind. When employed, this skill lets us put down the burden of our prehistoric magical speculations and step easily into the modern world civilized world, the very same world where life and the individual are sacred, where humans fly in space, communicate instantly across vast distances and never once worry about contracting smallpox.

But of course, no skill comes automatically. Critical thinking must be taught. And because it is an indispensable skill for our individual and collective success, it is our duty to be sure that no student graduates without it.