Critical Thinking

Extracts from an article by Lisa Hilton in The Spectator, 04.02.09

Is it not irresponsible to deny children the capacity to assess information for bias, distortion and inaccuracy in a world of unsupervised, unfiltered internet access? Good history teaching provides a confident perspective from which to dismiss, as much as absorb, the massive amounts of information with which children will be daily bombarded on the web. Huxley’s Bernard Marx claims that 62,400 repetitions equal one truth; not an implausible figure in the age of Google... In denying children the thrill of our own epic historical narrative we also deny them the option to compare, to judge, above all to refuse. Surely the point of all humanities teaching is not the regurgitation of whichever facts the government deems appropriate, but the ability, quite simply, to think? Orthodoxy is the absence of thought.