By Evelyn Lee Zi Qi 

“Students, you only have five minutes left,” said the lecturer, while you furiously finish up the last question of your Critical Thinking Skills test. It is submission time. Without any time left to check your paper, you quickly unlock your phone and took pictures of your answers. You navigate your way through the LMS, and you think to yourself: “WHAT IS WITH ALL THESE BUTTONS?!”, feeling confused and frustrated like your tech blind parents when they ask you how to download an app.

30 seconds left. After frantically pressing around the buttons, you finally found the correct buttons to properly submit in all the pictures you have. “Phew,” you think to yourself, relieved that you have submitted the answers in time. Just when you thought all is well, a small doubtful voice pops up in your mind asking you: “Are your answers even correct?” That alone is enough to send you down a vicious spiral of anxiety, a feeling even worse than when you were figuring out how to submit the test five minutes ago. Students, that is how CTS ruins your life, or does it really…?

Whenever we talk to our course mates, it is always fun to giggle and complain about the abomination that is CTS. I mean, that’s what Malaysians like to do right? Complain and bond over our common loathing for something, as Russian playwriter Anton Chekhov once said: “Nothing better forges a bond of love, friendship, or respect than common hatred toward something.” The same goes to me too, I like to complain to my friends a lot about the dread that CTS brings me and how it always makes me feel awful after a test. However, one day I had a revelation when one of my lecturers explained to us why HELP continues to teach CTS to students even though many students hate it. Apparently, many HELP Foundation alumni said that CTS is a subject that really helped them in their future lives, and they are very grateful to have learned it. This got me thinking, can CTS really be any good?

Thanks to the help of advanced technology, any information we want is only one click away. Anything that you want to know you can just ask Mr. (or Ms, whichever you prefer) Google. However, keep in mind that anyone can post information on the Internet, be it true or not. This is where all the misinformation and disinformation comes in. Ever wonder why are there still Flat-Earthers claiming that the Earth is flat? What’s worse is that the Flat Earth community seems to be growing, judging by attendance at Flat Earth conferences and events. Well, the Internet is the reason why. Many Flat-Earthers say YouTube was the key in helping them spread their message. A research even found that of the attendees at a Flat Earth conference, nearly all said they first got the idea through the video-sharing platform. The Flat-Earthers is only one of the many examples. The same phenomena can also be seen in the Antivax community, 5G haters, and so on. The Internet does bring us all together, but this power can also be used to bring conspiracy theorists together and allow them to share misinformation and disinformation easier.

Many years ago, when the Internet was the new sensation, we thought that we were marching into the Information Age. Little did we realize that we were actually on the verge of the Misinformation Age. Searching for truth in the age of misinformation can be hard. Claims and counterclaims spread like wildfire, but how do we know which is true? I think folks, this is where CTS comes in. Instead of blindly trusting what others say, CTS teaches us to differentiate truth from opinion, to see information through the lens of objectivity instead of relying on others to make the decisions for us.

I am sure that many of us have received some sort of fake news through our family groups in WhatsApp before. We look at our parents, aunties, and uncles believing all this information from unknown sources and we shake our heads at them, knowing that this might just be yet another chain mail of misinformation. We know what we know thanks to our learnings from educational classes such as CTS. At the present moment when one is bombarded with so much information that is confusing and confounding, critical thinking is badly needed if we are to keep our heads above the sea of information overload which can drown us. In ten years’ time, would you want to grow up to be a sensible person who uses critical thinking skills, or just yet another typical auntie or uncle? Well, I think it depends on this question: “Do you want to make CTS a foe or a friend?”