Critical Thinking

I'm excited to be teaching Social 9 and Psych 20 again. One of the reasons is because I am really, really passionate about making kids examine their own beliefs through a critical eye.
I am convinced that, if kids don't fully understand what they believe (about anything really) then, they are easily swayed into believing all sorts of things.
In Social, we are going to start examining what kids believe about the beginning of the world. This is one of the reasons I am thrilled to teach in the public system. I have the freedom to address all theories as theories. We look at the basic facts of a variety of cultural origin stories, the theory of the Big Bang/Evolution and the biblical creation theory.
Personally, as a Christian, I believe that God created the world and humankind. When I was in grade 9, my very agnostic teacher let me explain to him why. He told me he was proud of me because I understood my beliefs and could explain them and he gave me an A on the assignment. (Notice that I still remember this.) I want the same for my grade 9s.
I want them to be able to examine what they believe, why they believe and then, explain it. This is critical thinking. This goes beyond finding answers in a text. This should be memory making. At the age of 14, I think kids should be questioning things for themselves. They should be sorting and sifting through ideas and making their beliefs their own.
I wonder, how many of us get a chance to do this? How many of us have blindly followed something because it's what we've been told all our lives? How many of us have place faith in institutions, religion, science, technology, etc. without taking the time to examine WHY it is we believe in it.
I know it's a little lame and teacherish of me to write this post but, I get fired up about this kind of stuff. :)