About the School

At the moment in history when machines are taking over more and more of what used to be exclusively human territory, the ability to think critically is more important than ever. Our children's future will depend on this skill.

But, critical thinking doesn't come naturally to anyone. It needs to be built through deliberate, precise effort, meeting children where they are and targeting the specific intellectual abilities that need development. After more than a decade teaching philosophy at the City University of New York, and watching my own daughter move through a school system rich in content but thin on actual reasoning, I decided to build the thing that didn't exist.

The School of Critical Thinking is a small, focused organization. We do three things: we develop a structured critical thinking curriculum for children ages 8 to 16, organized around the five structures that govern how the world actually works (patterns, causality, uncertainty, models, and decisions); we publish books; and we run a precision test preparation platform for the standardized tests (such as SHSAT and others), built from the official DOE materials, with error analysis that targets exactly the thinking skills that drive real score improvement.

Our mission is to help parents ensure their children grow into critical thinkers: capable, well-rounded people who will flourish as professionals and will not be replaced by the next iteration of an AI algorithm. We don't focus on memorizing more content, but on learning how to reason.

Founder

Eldar Sarajlic

Eldar Sarajlic is an Associate Professor at the City University of New York. With a Ph.D. in philosophy, he is an expert in critical thinking, particularly in its application to education. He published numerous scholarly studies in the world's leading academic and popular publications over the last decade. His passion is helping young people acquire thinking skills desperately needed in the world dominated by technology.

His approach is rooted in the same tradition of truth-seeking as academic philosophy, but applied to the real problems that people face: decisions under uncertainty, reasoning about complex systems, and maintaining judgment when working alongside AI.