Thinking critically: #logophile

Brain maze: way out?

It may be a reflection on state education in the UK that I, as a music specialist in a high school, was from the 1980s onwards not only called on to teach European Studies and Special Needs French but also – despite being technologically illiterate – IT skills.

However, I soon discovered that knowing the detailed differences between, say, a bit and a byte, or the CPU and a hard drive, could be safely left up to 14yo geeks, because what I really needed to teach was critical thinking, especially when relatively safe access to the internet was required for research, classwork and homework. And for personal understanding and development too, of course.

Now, several decades later – what with targeted advertising, deliberate disinformation on social media, and, especially, an armada of chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence that potentially could offer misleading or downright false information – critical thinking about how we get our information and how we respond to it is not only more important than ever but vital to future global as well as individual wellbeing.

“Mimsy, Tedious and Woke”? #ReadingAusten2025

Jane Austen: watercolour by her sister Cassandra.

“I can’t bear Jane Austen’s tedious books,” thundered one recent pundit in a UK national daily newspaper (I won’t mention which one, I’ll leave it up to you to guess).¹ “Jane Austen’s so boring, even her culture war is dreary,” declared another recent hack who used to pontificate on fast motorcars for a living. And, in ancient history – 2013, to be more precise – another writer for Grub Street who should know better wrote, “So dull. So over-rated. Jane Austen doesn’t deserve to be on the £10 note.”

It won’t surprise you to note that the first two of these are males of a broadly rightwing – or at least firmly reactionary – persuasion, writing for papers owned by an over-powerful Australian magnate; the last is a literary critic (a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, no less, with a doctorate on Henry James and Freud) who commented in the pages of a rag owned by a secretive family firm based on an offshore tax haven. The first two have determinedly promoted an “anti-woke” agenda even before the term was invented while the last cattily described Austen as “a bitchy marriage-broker who never married.” Ouch, that’s Jane dismissed, the pretentious hussy.

Of course we’re all entitled to our opinions, are we not, whether we’re a highly qualified lecturer and author, a noted misogynist, a convert to farming to avoid inheritance tax or, in my case, a nonentity who blogs ignorantly about literary matters. My point is that the three professional writers are prominent contrarians – courting controversy on very public platforms with deliberately provocative statements; should we take their headlining assessments as anything more than mental barbs designed to raise our hackles?