ABSTRACT
How to be a Doubting Thomas Developing children’s interpretative abilities is a key feature in enabling pupils to both ‘decode’ non-fiction and write their own. Once they begin to ask for themselves ‘What is this language trying to say/make me think, feel or do?’, that major insight opens the door to purposeful exploration of the way non-fiction blends text type, form, style and intention. In that sense all language is influential and, as I’ve suggested in the pupil pages, sometimes it deliberately tries to ‘play tricks’, and for less than noble purposes. I feel very strongly that children should have a ‘working awareness’ of this, one that leads to a useful balance between open-mindedness and hard-nosed scepticism. As someone once said, you don’t want to be so open-minded that your wits fall out. On the other hand, an entrenched stance similarly limits a person’s ability to make reasoned decisions about the ideas they encounter. In another but not unrelated context, in Postman and Weingartner’s aforementioned book (see Bibliography) they describe this attitude as a ‘hardening of the categories’, where in more extreme cases the individual refuses to consider any new ideas that are not congruent with their previously established (and unmovable) beliefs. Such an unreasonable and unreasoning stance can be seen in all areas of human discussion. The history of scientific discovery, for instance, is riddled with stories of highly intelligent, learned men and women refusing to consider new facts, reacting instead with blind rage to any challenge to what they feel to be ‘the truth’. This has led several commentators to note that science progresses only because of the death of old scientists. An excessive statement . . . perhaps.
