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Chopping off the Hydra’s Head.
Written by: Armi
Along with many others, I’ve been battling on certain forums for several years now, trying to persuade blind believers to look at paranormal phenomena in a critical manner. This is a Herculean task, as no sooner have some people started to be a tad more sceptical, a new wave of innocents (to put it kindly) appears and the process has to begin all over again.
This takes a considerable amount of energy and effort, and recently I’ve been taking stock of the situation. It seems to me that no matter how much bouncing up and down on an internet forum one does, there are forever going to be hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of people whom one is unable to reach. It’s like the Hydra’s head – you chop one off, and two more sprout back in its place.
There are endless negative outcomes to blind belief – being relieved of cash by charlatans, having one’s grief exploited for entertainment purposes, ill-health as a consequence of a belief in treatments that don’t work - not to mention it being the thin end of the wedge; if we were all to blindly believe our politicians, for example, we would soon end up in a right old mess. So why isn’t critical thought taught in schools?
There is an A/S level qualification available in critical thought. I’m currently engaged in attempting to persuade my bosses to allow me to run it in school as an extra-curricular option. I know that some schools are already running these courses with great success, however, the education system seems more concerned with teaching children about ‘emotional intelligence’ (more flimflammery) and generally reinforcing the idea of the nanny state through the way it encourages students to focus on themselves as ‘victims’, rather than getting them to look beyond themselves and engage in subjects such as Literature and History which encourage the asking of awkward questions.
Instead of promoting critical thought and rewarding debate, the education system now shies away from this. In fact, at least one university (I can’t remember which, but Frank Furedi refers to it in one of his excellent books) has disbanded its debating team in case those involved are upset by having their views challenged. This extends to the classroom, where my colleagues and I are told we are never to tell a child they are wrong, in case we damage their fragile ‘self esteem’…..yet, to steal another point from Furedi, if you look at people who have achieved greatness over the centuries, they did so without anyone nurturing their delicate feelings, and in fact many of them succeeded whilst actually having what today would be called ‘low self esteem’. We’re teaching children to sit in a corner and cry, wallowing in their interior difficulties and emotional turmoil, instead of simply getting on with things.
It strikes me, that in the UK today young people are being educated to become drones. The emphasis on ICT skills and vocational studies makes this clear – students are no longer taught to love knowledge and to engage in adventurous thought. The government now prescribes that students are taught to sit at a computer monitor, crunching data and making pretty powerpoints, without a thought in their heads. In tandem with this is the push to make people view themselves as victims whom the state will help (‘There, there, dear, nanny will make it better….’). One only has to look at the invidious impact of the Healthy Schools initiative and Jamie Oliver to see that the government is instilling the idea in children that they Know What’s Best. I was emailed new proposals for a change in the National Curriculum recently and asked to comment on them. You can imagine my response when I discovered that three of the four objectives for teaching English have nothing whatsoever to do with gaining knowledge and subject related skills and instead were all about ‘self esteem’ and ‘emotional well-being.’
I’m continually shocked by what I see in schools. Fair Trade propaganda (one chap told a room full of 13 year olds that when they ate chocolate they were ‘eating the flesh of slaves’), incorrect or unproven information about global warming and the environment passed off as fact, lack of tolerance of fat people, the threat to eradicate Literature from the syllabus because ‘it’s too difficult’ (no it isn’t…..I teach kids of all abilities and ALL of them are capable of enjoying a complex text if it’s presented to them properly), students being told there are dangers around every corner so they never do anything adventurous…..it’s truly worrying.
In this sort of educational environment, it’s surely imperative that critical thinking skills should be taught in every school to every student. If we think it’s tiring now wrestling with the Hydra of blinkered belief, I think we’re going to have our work cut out for us in the years to come.
©Armi 2007
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