The flame of critical thinking

This essay was inspired by the very first meeting of European Academy of sciences of Ukraine Vice-President Oleg Maltsev with a remarkable scholar, Paul Frijters, which marked the beginning of fruitful collaboration with Academia Libera Mentis

Dr.  Paul Frijters – London School of Economics / Academia Libera Mentis
Liberamentis.org | liberamentis.substack.com

Introduction

Let me first off thank Dr. Oleg Viktorovich Maltsev of the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (EUASU) for his wonderful suggestion to have a friendly competition with me by each writing a 10-page paper in the summer of 2026 on the same topic. Which topic? The key issue that defines both his institute and mine, Academia Libera Mentis (ALM): what is critical thinking and how do we develop critical thinkers? Dr Oleg is trying to guard the flame of critical thinking in Kiev, I in Belgium, both from societies where critical thinking is seriously threatened. 

My viewpoint paper has a broad, ambitious agenda: to go from a discussion on what critical thinking is and what it needs to develop in young minds, to the current predicament facing critical thinking in the West and thus the personal challenge both I and Dr Oleg face. 

What is critical thinking?

Let us begin with Aristotle and Socrates. The view of the first has been summarised by the phrase “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” A first element of critical thinking is then a kind of ‘waiting room of the mind,’ which requires a bit of memory, an ability to focus, and an ability to create different internal representations of something to then evaluate and play with. 

Socrates championed the saying of the oracle of Delphi that all knowledge starts with self-knowledge: “know thyself.” The second element of critical thinking is then an ability to question oneself fearlessly, including the conclusions previously reached, thus necessitating a tolerance for having been wrong in the past. 

Memory, focus, different perspectives, courage, and tolerance are all like a muscle: they can be trained and strengthened, as well as diminished if not used. There are levels of fitness here: the critical thinking beginner cannot self-question or question the in-group close to self, whilst the advanced can do both. 

Let’s reflect further on what Aristotle’s critical waiting room really requires and implies. Importantly, to question needs reflective creativity (“what can inform me about this thought and what else could be going on than what is claimed?”) and thus mastery over multiple narratives and perspectives. Suppose for instance that one examines the claim that “most poor people strongly admire at least one famous rich person.” The critical thinker might ask of this claim “what would a Marxist think about this?” or “is there a Bible quote that agrees with this?” and infer from those perspectives an initial opinion on whether the statement is true or false. One can similarly draw on personal experience, such as by asking “do the poor women I see at the hairdresser admire some famous princess?” and infer from the answer whether the general claim is true or not. Creativity gets involved if one considers a counterclaim such as “most poor people are jealous of rich people but do not admire them” for which a person can then try to find further evidence. 

The more narratives and perspectives a person understands and can adopt, the more likely that he or she will find the major flaws and key strengths in a new thought. As such, knowing multiple languages, cultures, and ways of disciplined thinking are all investments into critical thinking because they enrich the process of evaluating thoughts in the mental waiting room. Relatedly, learning to read how well others know something allows a person to outsource internal deliberations and internal multiple perspectives. Instead of looking for data or own experiences to evaluate the claim, one could just ask a friend if it is true that “most people strongly admire at least one famous rich person.” 

Also, if an idea has, roughly speaking, ‘passed’ the tests of the critical waiting room, where does it go? For advanced thinkers, accepted ideas feed into a constructed worldview[1], which contains the things a person believes and bases their actions on. The condition that someone acts on the things they agree with is not trivial. Beginners do not construct their own worldview at all but use low-level critical thinking as a tool to push away outsiders, whilst they simply blindly follow their in-group in their beliefs and habits, ready to change what they say they believe when the group changes its mind. The advanced have a personal worldview they take seriously, a kind of evolving knowledge garden that they maintain and expand with new experiences and information. Yet even the advanced will still rely on their group for many beliefs and habits, such as the beliefs embedded in the language taught to them when young and the implicit subconscious habits of reading the emotions of others from body language. No garden is ever truly isolated from the jungle it came from. 

Like a garden, worldviews can deteriorate with age and through being fed low-quality information and highly inconsistent beliefs. The advanced critical thinker is thus both good and fast at sifting ideas in a waiting room rich in perspectives, as well as equipped with many mental habits to decide on what is a high-quality source of information versus a low-quality source. Having a high-quality group of others whose motivations are known speeds up the construction of a high-quality knowledge garden, implying that social-emotional skills allowing one to judge others are crucial for a top-level critical mind. Similarly, the more high-quality the initial exposures during childhood, the less polluted the knowledge garden and thus the less cleaning up to do later, allowing a further rapid growth. Summarising: the mental soil matters - the quality of the environment has an effect. Whole populations can be dumbed down and made less critical by polluting the information space when they are young. 

What does a mind need to function well and quickly sift ideas in the waiting room? As has been known since Roman times, mens sana in sana corpore: a healthy mind needs a healthy body. A good diet, contact with nature, and enough exercise are investments into critical thinking. Similarly, a mind is healthier if a person has warm social relations and a lack of stress. 

And what is implied by the dictum ‘know thyself?’ The importance of the phrase derives from the great tendency of the human mind to blindly follow the in-group and to hate admitting – even to oneself – that one was wrong. We humans tend to follow the in-group as to what we believe about ourselves and others, whilst our ego is in the way of sifting the things we already believe. 

Both tendencies have a good reason: as social animals who rely on a group to survive, following that group in most things is both necessary and efficient compared to having to figure everything out oneself.  A protective ego is part of a healthy internal life: an ability to concentrate on pressing new problems needs a habit of actively warding off most demands for our attention, including the demands of the own subconscious. This means that a default of rejecting what goes against current beliefs is both necessary and efficient. One expects most people to regularly make mistakes in this regard, accepting false group beliefs and not correcting false own beliefs. 

At the higher levels of critical thinking, both our sociality and ego have negative consequences. Following the group makes one prey to mass-delusions, marketing, and propaganda. The ego prevents one from being honest to self. It requires additional habits of thought to overcome these negative implications whilst retaining the benefits. A key habit is to separate the ego from safety, i.e. not to take disagreement personal. Such additional habits need to be learned and maintained. An example of how schools can help is via school debates wherein viewpoints are externally given (‘argue the following statement that goes against what you usually say’), because then the group that the school represents gives permission to regard oneself critically. Also, it is easier to be compassionate with others if one has tried to see things from their point of view.

Indeed, one of the things we do at ALM in debates is to ask others to argue what we passionately believe whilst taking the opposite position oneself, creating a habit of compassionate self-reflection. ‘Know thyself’ thus involves emotional calm and an ability to mentally detach from ego. Like an efficient waiting room, this is easier with a healthy body and emotional security. In turn, emotional security is helped by a strong source of unconditional familial love around one: a critical thinker is the achievement of many influences.

Another implication from the idea of a waiting room and a knowledge garden arises if we consider the question where one starts in life. Surely, at birth we start with almost nothing. Young babies need to be stimulated and fed high-quality information. And does it really make sense for a young baby to doubt the information that parents and carers give that baby, or does it make sense to blindly accept the information from those who love the baby because that helps faster learning? Surely, blind acceptance makes sense at the start, which implies that even a high-level critical mind has known an initial period of being very un-critical, a period wherein it was fed with a lot of information from parents and the wider community. The better that initial information, the less cleaning up is needed later and thus the greater the initial advantage. The same goes for a lot of habits that are useful in developing a high-quality worldview, such as a love of reading and learning. A person is not born as a high-level critical thinker but emerges with a lot of help.

These simple reflections on the key messages of Aristotle and Socrates alert us to the large role of the group in individual critical thinking and the key imperfect result: a growing worldview that, even as an adult, will still contain a lot of false beliefs that were either implanted in childhood and have not yet been weeded out or that came in later via own mistakes and manipulation by others. These reflections differ from utopian definitions like ‘a critical thinker questions everything’ or ‘a critical thinker believes only that which cannot be falsified’. 

As a quick counter to the idea that one should reject what can be falsified, which is the position of the philosopher Karl Popper: all maps and all measurement (which are invariably imperfect and simplifications) are falsifiable and should thus not be ‘believed in’ by Popperians, leaving them with the impossible task of understanding the full complexity of things. Given imperfect measurement and imperfect representation, falsifiability is not a useful criterion in the world of facts and categories. This immediately implies the same is true for causal claims that X causes Y because all causal claims come with the disclaimer of ‘Ceteris Paribus’ (meaning ‘all else equal’). If there is no perfect way to know current reality, there is no actual way to be sure that ‘Ceteris Paribus’ applies and hence, strictly speaking, no clean falsification of causal claims. Indeed, there are whole fields of inquiry, such as economics and sociology, wherein practically every general causal claim (like ‘massive money printing leads to inflation’) is strictly speaking falsifiable but where one can make no progress and give no useful advice without generalisations. As the famous Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen once said, he would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. The task of the critical thinker is thereby vastly more difficult than judging whether something is 100% true. 

Illustration: levels of critical usage of statistics and societal systems.      

One can think of three levels of critical thinking[2], ranging from beginner to advanced. What would this look like in, say, statistics? Remember that the crucial requirement of a thought that passed the waiting room is that behaviour is made consistent with it. Then, the beginner needs to be able to recognise that 2+2 is not 6 and that 1/1000 is more than 1/1000000 even if outsiders would claim the opposite vigorously. This sounds more trivial than it is, because most people cannot read numbers and for instance have no idea that 1/1000 (the chance of, say, a serious car accident this year) is much higher than 1/1000000 (the chance of, say, a shark attack when swimming in the sea) and are equally afraid of both. Only quite trained minds can hold on to the implications of basic numbers when propaganda and imagery try to derail them.

The intermediate can question the own group and therefore needs to be able to figure out which empirical claims from both insiders and authority are more likely, requiring a worldview in which there are relative certainties and wherein insiders too have reasons to deliberately mislead others. Hence, if the government claims that the chance of shark attacks is 1/1000 and that this is a reason to erect costly undersea nets along the coast, the intermediate critical thinker would doubt the claim, recognise the likelihood of being misled, and investigate by looking for independent data on shark attacks. From my experience, we are now talking about a level of critical thinking about statistics that most university students do not achieve, forcing them to either accept everything from particular sources or dismiss everything.

The advanced have a thriving personal knowledge garden. They assume imperfect measurement and deliberate misdirection/misinterpretation as a regular part of the statistical landscape. The advanced would immediate recognise how a government might construct a definition of ‘shark attacks’ such that it could get the answers it wanted, whilst still allowing for the possibility that the shark nets are a good idea even if oversold. The advanced would also be creative and able to construct data on strange questions, such as whether 19^th century Britain was on average a happier place than 20^th century Britain, even though no reported happiness data exists for 19^th century Britain. The advanced could for instance think of how to use paintings and writings from both periods to create an index of how happy the words and images from both times were, yielding a suggestive answer to the question. Some creatively constructed data helps being vaguely right. 

The advanced thus have an internal map of the relative magnitudes and likelihoods of many things, as well as an ability to recognise how to get information from a very wide range of sources.

A similar categorisation can be done with respect to thinking about whole societal systems, such as the health system. The beginner would be able to argue against systems different from his own, e.g. how great the health system in his country is and how terrible that of another. The intermediate could weigh different aspects of existing systems, e.g. whether cardiology is more cost-effective than cancer treatments. The advanced would be able to imagine and reasonably evaluate entirely different systems, such as whether the Cuban health system is better than the UK one and whether a Cuban-like system could be implemented in the UK, requiring an ability to see the interconnections and transition paths of entire societies.

The advanced thus have some method of holding a description of whole systems of society in their heads, allowing them to compare and come up with possible change scenarios. This requires a lot of practice, but can be invested in, for instance by making frequent predictions for how large reforms in countries are going to work out and then checking later where that prediction was lacking. This is indeed one of the things we do at ALM: we let all students make predictions of events in three months’ time, and then let them evaluate what actually happened three months later so as to help them improve their ability to read and predict complicated environments.

What skills to encourage in a developing critical mind?

We can now quickly review some important skills and habits of critical thinkers. 

A very important one is of course some desire for truth: some motivation to embark upon the life-long project of consciously building and improving an individual worldview. The main options are to either inculcate a love of truth itself, or to bind a desire for truth with things one can ‘win’ via a better understanding. There are many habits that can go together with such a conscious worldview development, such as the habit of the French 19^th century novelist Jules Verne to write down his theories and deductions on small notes. He wrote more than ten thousand small notes, some of which were sent into space. Jules Verne thus very consciously and deliberately worked on his knowledge garden via his notes. 

To quickly mention other skills, resources, and habits important in critical thinking: playfulness, zooming in and out, perspective switching, pattern recognition, political awareness, practising predictions to divorce from ego, some independence of the group and authority in the own mind, multiple languages and cultural perspectives learned from travel or immersion, cross-checking, an aristocratic mindset of independence, self-forgiveness, an ability to get information from conversations, statistical analyses, scenario construction, investigative journalism skills, mathematical modelling, theorising, map-making, categorisation, group brainstorming, vetted sources, travel companions (friends and sparring partners), a culture and larger group with similar ideals (freedom of thought/conscience/speech), powers of concentration.

Obviously, I do not have the time to explain all these or how to invest in them. The point of the large list, which still is only a small subset of the skills, resources, and habits of top-level critical thinkers, is that it contains many dimensions and would require the help of many people and many experiences to acquire. A critical thinker then arises from a lifelong journey with influences from the parents, the family, the community, the schools, and the wider society.

Whilst the literature on how to raise critical thinkers is vast, it is useful for the purpose of understanding the problems of today to sketch the basic elements of the ideal classic European recipe[3]. Here I am thinking of the Grammar schools in England, the Gymnasiums in Germany, the Steiner school philosophy, and the education roughly enjoyed by some of the greats of science, like Charles Darwin, Renee Descartes, Max Planck, and Enrico Fermi:

• An emotionally warm home that gives the developing child a lot of basic relevant knowledge, skills, and habits. This includes a love of reading, lots of different fairytales and narratives, multiple languages and cultures, open discussions at the dinner table, regular contact with the natural environment, and a playful attitude regarding data and disagreement.
• Unstructured play with other children coupled with a stimulating learning community environment. This can involve kindergartens, church activities, family events, and local friends. Importantly, the wider community ideally supports a love of truth and has valued societal institutions that allow and stimulate critical thinking (open debate, freedom of thought, a rich media landscape, an appreciation of previous critical thinkers, and so forth). This in turn is aided by a political landscape in which diversity of thought is appreciated and stimulated, which probably requires a separation of powers, strong communities with power independent of the government, and institutions that self-clean.
• Primary school teaching that helps develop the basic tools to explore the information humanity has assembled: basic mathematics, reading, writing, communication, social-emotional abilities, concentration, and a preliminary garden of knowledge. That preliminary garden includes data like where the major rivers and mountains are, but also knowledge of how money and trade works as well as the basics of politics, psychology, history, and so forth. Primary school at best gives an integrated knowledge garden to build on, as well as the skills and networks to build an own worldview rapidly and efficiently, such as the ability to slot into different roles. In turn, such schools need communities that set them up and support them.
• Secondary school teaching that involves high-level critical skills, including self-reflection, debate, an awareness of changing cultures, an aristocratic mindset[4] of independent thinking, a love of truth and usefulness, excursions that enrich, regular contact with nature, cultural grounding, scientific skills (experimentation, scientific instruments, reflection using multiple forms of information, etc.), the language of music and art, and so forth. At best, the knowledge is still integrated, but a student gradually learns to drill down, develop abstract thinking, and gradually develops a personal internal mental garden of perspectives and current beliefs (‘working theories’). These schools also develop the habits and abilities that support the body and the mind, ranging from sports to art to religious and spiritual development: they develop the whole person. Again, such schools need communities and societal structures that set them up and support them.
• A life rich in new experiences, perspectives, personal adventures, responsibilities, new skills, warm relations, and different cultures. The critical thinker gradually becomes faster and better at sifting information, including a re-evaluation of previous beliefs and deductions so that the own knowledge garden includes a habit of self-cleaning. The developing worldview not merely informs what the individual does, but is also the basis for helping others, with the results providing feedback on deficiencies in the current own worldview.

Obviously, there are variations to this idealised recipe across countries, regions, and time that produce roughly the same outcome. For instance, where families are extended and organise a lot of unstructured play as well as a book-appreciating environment for children, primary schools can skip those elements. In communities that teach everyone not to take every disagreement personally, secondary schools can skip those lessons. If sports and arts are organised by a local church, neither family nor school need to do so. And so forth: as the famous saying goes, “it takes a village to raise a child,” implying that education is not merely about family or school and that different community structures can fill the same role. 

The pinnacle of the classic European system for producing and maintaining critical thinking was an intellectual aristocracy which maintained the libraries of ancient thought, wrote to each other of new developments and disagreements, came together in Salons and conferences, ran schools and academies, and was open to newcomers on the basis of intellectual merit. This intellectual aristocracy saw itself as separate from power, charged with an independent duty to improve society, an intellectual variant of “Noblesse Oblige” (French for ‘nobility obliges’). The special thing about aristocracy is that they are part of society and yet, in mind, both separate and expected to be separate: society expects them to have independent thoughts useful for the benefit of society. One can argue that this intellectual aristocracy started with the schools of Socrates and Plato (who founded the first Academia), though one can also argued that it only gradually emerged from the monasteries and centres of learning in medieval Europe. Once upon a time, this group wrote and spoke Latin. 

            The current state of play

In a short paper one does not have the time to extensively discuss what has gone wrong and why, so I can only briefly touch upon the main problems, referring to external sources for more depth. The five big problems that supporters of critical thinking now face:

• A breakdown of the old aristocratic intellectual institutions, particularly the universities[5]. From elite institutions that developed the whole person, they have become mass-education factories oriented towards making money whilst interacting less with the developing young mind. For instance, almost no university sees it as their problem when young minds are spending half their waking time playing games online, whereas Socrates and his students saw it as their duty to really be ‘their brother’s keeper.’ There is now less community formation, less development of the religious and spiritual element, less diversity of thought, less care in passing on high-quality integrated information instead of disciplinary dogma, less time learning anything, an increase in commercial and political indoctrination, and a dumbing-down of the curriculum. We see this breakdown everywhere in the West.
• The detrimental effects of mobile phones and addictive social media on the ability of young minds to concentrate, tolerate different viewpoints, recognise good information from bad, and access high-quality information rather than being bombarded by commercial and political disinformation. This is something we see in the whole world, with as visible effects plummeting concentration spans and IQ levels.
• An increase in the concentration and integration of political and commercial powers, leading to their ability to manipulate the information and education spaces. This in turn creates a strong trend against critical thinking and powerful barriers against a rejuvenation of the old aristocratic intellectual institutions. The increased concentration of power, coupled with new technologies, also makes it easier for those powers to determine what is considered science and to pollute the information space. Historical databases and literature can now increasingly be hidden from view and falsified by armies of paid influencers and AI bots. Moreover, the increased power centration comes with regulatory, financial, physical, and reputational costs of trying to grow alternatives outside of the controlled systems. Mainstream social science is thus now part of the problem.
• The gradual destruction of the power and role of the family, the local community, and the local religions, as state bureaucracy and the globalised market have taken over their main roles. From schools set up and run by local communities to state-controlled schools and curricula. From local health systems to government-accredited and controlled health systems. From local media to state-allowed media. From local shops to franchises of a few large international ones. From local sports to global media entertainment. From strong community ties to anonymous living in large cities. These developments mean that perhaps most of the population has never experienced a strong local community and thus has no experienced social reality that differs from the state and the global market, creating total mental dependency.
• A breakdown of the business model for critical thinkers. In previous centuries, critical thinkers were needed to run government, teach, design internal reforms of organisations, and lead their communities. Now, like in the Soviet Union, the primary requirement of those roles, both in government and business, is uncritical loyalty to the powers that be. Openly critical thinkers are thereby like the dissidents in the Soviet Union: without a large pool of good jobs they can do. They must survive in the margins but are not employed where they would be most useful, namely as reformers of large human systems. There are probably lots of jobs for critical thinkers who keep quiet about matters of politics and money, but their silence gradually turns them into intellectual cowards and leaves society without a visible appreciation of critical thinking, gradually destroying its cultural legitimacy.

These are thus the challenges currently facing the supporters of critical thought in Europe and the West. There are a few remaining bastions where critical thinking can still happen and is celebrated, such as the world of books and a few physical enclaves like Switzerland and particular communities in the US. Yet, on the whole critical thinking is in decline and faces an immediate future that looks dark.

Elements of a critical thinking countermovement

Reflecting the life-journey needed to become a critical thinker, a successful countermovement will have to involve many different elements:

• Communities of families that have escaped the clutches of authoritarianism and that embrace critical thinking. New communities like this are emerging slowly, sometimes as enclaves in Latin America or in remote places in the West. There, communities of families do a lot of home schooling and can adopt the best of the old elite critical thinking institutions. Note that these communities also need to have paying jobs and will often be forced to organise lots of things the state controls or used to organise (health care, own food, a separate trading system, own banking, and so forth). For many, the creation of new communities will require learning how to be a community and getting used to the constraints of strong communities.[6]
• New methods of teaching and living that incorporate the best of new technologies (social media, mobile phones, Artificial Intelligence) without their addictive and mind-destroying elements[7]. This requires experimentation of both individuals and whole communities, since a major reason that individuals cannot escape is that their communities use the same technologies.
• A new network of critical thinking intellectual institutions independent from both government, political ideology, and Big Business. From primary schools to new academies and life-long learning. This will probably involve new publishing houses, new textbooks, student exchange, joint programs, and mutual support. A major challenge is to find workable business models that are robust to attempts at interference and do not import the problems of existing institutions. Multiple examples of how it can work need to be generated and shared. Our own book, “Minds that Dare” details our business model, as well as a lot of the elements Academia Libera Mentis discovered and incorporates to develop critical thinking among students, ranging from prediction cycles to peer-learning to Socratic teaching.[8]
• A network of new businesses that employ critical thinkers, servicing both independent communities and whatever part of the mainstream they can. This might involve businesses set up by critical thinkers and their communities. It might involve the transformation of existing companies by leaders who want some part of their organisation to become critical thinking. This might involve new networks and parallel markets, like a recognised job market for critical thinkers (and perhaps a marriage market too!).

Like raising a child needs a village and requires real cooperation, so too does a new Western critical-thinking community need many to play a role and together become a viable community. It is hard to predict whether and how quick it will happen, or what the most promising avenues are: solutions will have to emerge organically as many individuals and small groups try different avenues and fill different niches, connecting with each other as they discover they have built different parts of the same broader community. Yet, exactly this has happened many times before in the history of Western countries when periods of authoritarianism and extreme ideology forced critical thinking to survive in the margins. In those margins, as the then-dissident and later Czech president Vaclav Havel wonderfully described in 1978,[9] there is beauty and power in refusing apathy. But not a lot of money.

Conclusions

An advanced critical thinker maintains a high-quality thriving individual knowledge garden that is the basis for personal decision making and helping others. In the mental room where thoughts await being let into this garden, the critical thinker can apply many different ideological and cultural perspectives to new thoughts, coming to a nuanced understanding of where a new thought is useful and where it is inferior to what is already in the garden. Elements of the garden are themselves also regularly re-evaluated for internal consistency and because of new insights. The critical thinker combines this personal knowledge garden with habits, networks, and heuristics that tap the recognised valuable knowledge of friends and others.

It needs a whole society to bring forth great critical minds and, in my judgment, the critical thought systems Western societies developed over centuries have rapidly degraded in the last 20 years such that critical thinking is now a rarity. Like in the old Soviet Union, a stifling ideology and bureaucracy has perverted the old bastions of critical thought, forcing its remnants into the shadows. Social media, mobile phones, online gaming, and other modern technologies have accelerated the decline and given rise to new problems for the healthy development of young minds. By and large, mainstream Western education has no real interest in addressing the new problems and is making them worse. Dark times.

The challenges of small independent academic institutions like EUASU and Academia Libera Mentis are then to provide an oasis for elite-level critical thinking and be a small part of the general countermovement. We need to support the families that have escaped mainstream education with new curricula; we need to experiment with new methods of teaching and new relationships with technology so as to find out what works; we need to keep independent critical research and societal analysis alive; we need to network with other educational initiatives to be part of new lifelong learning critical thinking paths; and we need to help create and network with new businesses that provide jobs for our students. 

Most of all, we need to keep the rejuvenation of critical thinking fun. Part of that fun is friendly competition. So … having written this paper, I look forward to reading what Dr Oleg has come up with and be inspired by his insights.

Hodbomont, July 10^th 2026. 

[1] Here, I follow https://liberamentis.org/education-vision/ which in turn is largely Kayekian and more fully explained by Dr Tjeerd Andringa: https://corecognition.com/analyses/self-actualization/

[2] I am here simplifying the six levels discerned by Perry, W. G. (1998). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. Jossey-Bass.

[3] Again, https://corecognition.com/analyses/self-actualization/ explains more deeply and gives references.

[4] See https://liberamentis.substack.com/p/episode-23-aristocrats for a longer discussion.

[5] See https://brownstone.org/articles/what-must-modern-top-flight-education-look-like/ and https://www.scienceandfreedom.org/articles/an-enlightenment-model-of-a-modern-university/ for papers and discussions on this.

[6] A nice story from a Ukrainian about such re-learning is https://liberamentis.substack.com/p/episode-3-community-living

[7] E.g. https://liberamentis.substack.com/p/episode-35-educational-opportunities

[8] For a short description: https://liberamentis.org/3-month-program/ Longer descriptions: liberamentis.substack.com

[9] A great description of this is Havel, V. (2009, originally 1978). The power of the powerless (routledge revivals): Citizens against the state in central-eastern europe. Routledge.