The goal of critical thinking is independent thinking.

You want to make sure you graduate college as an independent thinker. If your college education gives you nothing else, it should give you that, or it's no more than a trade school.

You want to make sure you are not dependent on others to tell you what to think…

• You're not a child; your parents don't make your decisions for you anymore. You decide many things for yourself. Your parents may help you-if you're lucky-but they don't make your important decisions for you anymore. Though you may respect one another, and I hope you do, their values may differ from yours.
• You're not an adolescent; you don't have to have the same opinions as your peers, though you may sometimes. But you don't have to. You've grown beyond peer pressure.
  
• AND now you're a young adult, not a kid or a piece of clay to be shaped and molded; you're more than an inert sponge soaking up the opinions of your textbooks and your professors-ideally, they are there to give you the tools to help you build your own opinions, not to indoctrinate you to any particular mode of thinking.
• Most of all, you are not dependent on the government or the mass media to tell you what to think, though they are trying very hard to tell you what to think day and night, night and day. But you have learned, I hope, to form your own opinions, make your own sound judgments.

When you join the public conversation as a critical thinker, an independent thinker, you join it in your OWN voice, not the parroted voice of others. When you are confident about doing that, you'll know you got your money's worth from your college education.

In practice, this independent thinking looks like critical thinking, which we can define as a certain set of skills: RESPONDING, QUESTIONING, ANALYZING, INTERPRETING, SYNTHESIZING, AND EVALUATING. Each of these requires active engagement, active thinking—no time for being passive, no time for sitting back and sponging things up.