Teach children critical thinking skills

I was embarrassed reading this article in thenewpaper on 6 May by a Lia Testa Teismann, head of secondary courses at the British Council. What she talked about, teaching our young critical thinking to know what is fake news and misinformation is all common sense. When our daft Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act(POFMA), oops, I mean draft, was read in Parliament, it was such a disappointment that no one dare to tell the minister how nonsensical is this bill. It was equally disappointing that none of our thinkers, scholars, academics, educationists spoke up in the same vein to debunk the myth concocted by the authority about fake news.
 
Maybe they all agree that we should bring up our children in a cocoon or bubble, screened and protected from all the fake news, no need to tell them the truth, no need to teach them to tell the difference from fake news, misinformation and the truth, just keep them away from each other. This is how irresponsible our thinking community or academics are on this matter. Life is not simply black and white and Singaporeans, including children and adults need to face them squarely in their lives.
 
If we don’t teach out young to think, how could they fend for themselves when they are brought up in an environment without fake news and misinformation? The hard truth is that the authority everywhere is the biggest manufacturer of fake news and misinformation. Look at how our history books were written by the West, the colonialists. Till today, practically every adult is still spouting the nonsense, the misinformation that Singapore was founded by Stamford Raffles. What kind of bull is this? When are we going to rewrite our history correctly to remove this fake information, that Raffles did not found Singapore? Singapore and the people of Singapore existed way before even Raffles was born.
 
The fault of educating our young lies in our adults, and sad to say many of our adults could not think, could not differentiate between truth and fake news or misinformation or propaganda of the state. When questioned about the threat of China, Mahathir told the journalists off pointedly. Where is the threat from China? Malaya/Malaysia was having good relations with China for thousands of years before the Europeans came, and the Chinese did not conquer or colonise them. But when the Europeans came, within two days, they conquered and colonized Malaya and ruled for nearly 200 years. Same as all the Asian and SE Asian countries, all suffered the same fate, conquered and ruled by the Europeans, not by China.
 
But if you ask any silly Asian, especially the bananas, they would respond like robots, to tell you how they fear China, an expansionist and aggressive country, wanting to conquer and rule the world. Who have done that and who is ruling the world? These unthinking adults did not know that they have been planted with misinformation by the West for their entire life, reading western propaganda and white lies as the truth, as history.
 
Did our govt and leaders know the difference? Who needs critical thinking skills, the adults or children or the people supposedly wise enough to implement the new ‘akan datang’ law to be obeyed without thinking?
To teach critical thinking, we need to rewrite our history books and learn a new history of our little island and the whole of Asia and the world from our own perspectives as victims of the marauding West. Do the adults understand the meaning of American Exceptionalism, Doctrine of Christian Discovery, or things like lobbying when lobbying is actually corruption and bribery at the highest level in American politics said differently? The West used different words to disguise their evilness and wickedness but used crude words to smear the rest of the world, regime change is invasion of a country. Period. Rule of law is law that you must obey, not the Americans or the West, their law for you to live by.
 
If we gag a nation of people, what kind of people will they become? Sanitized like kindergarten children, reading only fairy tales and believing in fairy tales?