Before the school day starts, many kids have scrolled past dozens of opinions and claims, and once they arrive at school, they’ll hear classmates discussing what they saw online. Children need strong critical thinking skills to pause and carefully evaluate the flood of information and misinformation they encounter every day.
Critical thinking covers a range of topics like data literacy and fallacy detection, but its foundation is intellectual humility: knowing we don’t have all the answers and can be wrong. That mindset prepares the brain for healthy skepticism.
An effective way to nurture intellectual humility is to model it. Social-learning theory, first articulated by psychologist Albert Bandura, states that children don’t learn only from what adults tell them; they imitate what adults do. When adults admit uncertainty or revise a belief, they demonstrate how a rational person handles incomplete information.
There are other benefits of modeling intellectual humility: A 2024 study by Porter et al. found that when teachers exhibit intellectual humility by publicly admitting confusion or ignorance, students become more engaged and motivated to learn.
However, modelling intellectual humility can be challenging. Decades of research on the overconfidence effect show that even experts overrate their knowledge. Moreover, even when we recognize our limitations, acknowledging them in front of children can feel uncomfortable.
To combat this, it helps to have ready language. I suggest adults keep an eye out for opportunities to say these two simple phrases to children: "I don’t know" and "I was wrong."
"I Don’t Know"
I used to teach science to children, and my students regularly asked questions that were so obscure or specific that I had to say, "I don’t know."
Sometimes, adults guess to hide their ignorance when a child asks them a question to which they don’t know the answer. This carries the risk of planting misinformation that can stick for a long time. Psychologists call this the continued-influence effect: Once a false claim is stored in memory, it keeps shaping later thinking even after you correct it. Instead of guessing, we should embrace opportunities to say "I don’t know" to children because this phrase can be used as a powerful educational tool.
It can present an opportunity to teach research skills. Time allowing, look up the answer together and turn it into a mini-lesson on how to identify credible sources and cross-check facts.
It also teaches kids that learning never stops. When an adult says, "I don’t know," kids see that expertise is not a finish line. It teaches them that having more to learn isn’t a flaw, but the normal condition of a curious mind.
"I Was Wrong"
Admitting error is the complement to admitting ignorance: It shows how a rational thinker updates beliefs with new evidence.
Modelling open revision of beliefs might look like this:
Name the error and correct it. "Yesterday, I said Jupiter has 67 moons, but I was wrong. It actually has 95."
Explain the reason for the update. "I checked NASA’s website and learned that astronomers recently discovered several small moons, so my information was outdated."
State a takeaway. "Good thinkers revise their answers when better evidence shows up, and that’s what I’m doing now."
This teaches that knowledge is always provisional and that changing your mind is a strength, not a weakness.
Praising Intellectual Humility
The key processes in Bandura’s social-learning theory are:
attention
memory
reproduction
motivation
Kids notice what we do, remember it, try it out, and keep doing it if the behavior seems rewarding. That means it’s important not only to model the behavior but to praise kids for doing it.
Child psychologist Ronald Crouch recommends the "Model-Label-Praise" method for helping kids build critical thinking skills. Here are some examples of how that might look:
If your child asks you something and you don’t know the answer, you might say, "I don’t know" (model). When they copy this behavior and admit to not knowing something, you can respond with, "That’s honest (label). Thanks for being straight with me. No one knows everything, and admitting to this is the first step of learning something new (praise)."
If a child admits to being wrong or changes their mind about a belief due to new evidence, you can say, "You’re so open-minded; checking the evidence and revising your beliefs is what good thinkers do." Avoid saying, "I told you so," because this frames correction as failure.
When adults say "I don’t know" and "I was wrong"—and then label and praise it when kids do the same—not knowing something becomes the starting line of inquiry, and changing your beliefs becomes a sign of an open and rational mind. Repeated moments like these instill the intellectual humility that is at the foundation of critical thinking.
Stephanie Simoes