You read in the paper this morning that people who take multivitamins have fewer heart attacks and are less likely to get cancer than people who don't. Does this information make you more likely to want to take multivitamins? To truly prepare students for life, schools need to teach them the critical thinking skills they need to answer questions like this one, writes Richard E. Nisbett. A number of basic thinking skills commonly taught in courses like microeconomics, statistics, psychology, and philosophy can help people solve everyday problems, reason about common life events, and evaluate claims made by the media, politicians, and advertisers. Nisbett discusses examples like confounded variables (behavioral science); the law of sunk costs (economics); and the law of large numbers (statistics). He recommends that schools make room in the curriculum to teach these principles and to show students how they apply to daily life.