In my previous blog, I wrote about the responsibility we have to protect children as they navigate an increasingly digital childhood. There are things we can and should do as parents, schools, governments and technology companies to make that environment safer. But protection can only take us so far. As children grow older, the question changes. It is no longer simply about what we allow them to access. It becomes a question of whether we have given them the skills to make sense of what they encounter.

This is becoming increasingly important because the internet has changed from being primarily a place where we went to find information into an environment in which information constantly finds us. Our children do not necessarily have to search for a news story, a political opinion, a conspiracy theory or a piece of misinformation. It can appear in their feed, be recommended by an algorithm, be shared by a friend or be presented to them by an artificial intelligence tool. They can encounter it before they have even thought about whether they want to know about it.

And now artificial intelligence is changing the problem again. A photograph is no longer necessarily evidence that something happened. A video can be manipulated. A voice can be recreated. An image can be generated from a description. A piece of writing can sound authoritative while containing information that has simply been invented. The technology is becoming increasingly good at producing things that look, sound and feel convincing.

This is where critical thinking becomes so important.

Critical thinking is sometimes described as the ability to identify a weak argument or spot a mistake. I think it is much more than that. It is the willingness and ability to examine information, question assumptions, consider evidence, recognise our own biases and remain open to the possibility that we might be wrong.

Perhaps the most important distinction is that critical thinking is not about teaching children what to think. It is about teaching them how to decide what they should think.

That sounds straightforward until we consider how difficult it can be. We are all susceptible to information that confirms what we already believe. We are more likely to trust people we agree with and question people we don’t. We can all be persuaded by something that makes us angry, frightened or excited. Being intelligent does not make us immune to this. In some cases, it can simply make us better at constructing arguments to defend what we already believe.

When I taught Theory of Knowledge as part of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme, the central question was, “How do we know?” It is a deceptively simple question, but it is one that is worth teaching children to ask. Where did this information come from? Who originally said it? What evidence supports it? Is the evidence reliable? Can I find the original source? Are other independent sources saying the same thing? Is there another explanation? What information might be missing? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of all: would I believe this if it told me something that challenged what I already believe?

The last question matters because critical thinking is not only about evaluating other people’s thinking. It requires us to examine our own. It is also about questioning authority, whether that authority is a government official, a journalist, a teacher, a trusted friend or whomever. Being told something by somebody we respect does not make it automatically true, any more than disagreeing with somebody makes them automatically wrong.

This becomes particularly interesting when we talk about conspiracy theories. It would be easy to tell children that conspiracy theories are simply untrue, but that would actually teach them a rather poor form of critical thinking. History contains genuine conspiracies, cover-ups and coordinated wrongdoing. Watergate happened. Governments have conducted secret surveillance programmes. Companies have concealed wrongdoing. People in positions of power have sometimes deliberately misled the public.

The fact that some conspiracies have been real does not mean that every conspiracy theory is credible. It means that the label itself tells us very little. A claim does not become true because somebody calls it a conspiracy. Equally, it does not become false simply because it sounds like one. We still have to examine the evidence.

That distinction is important because the world our children are growing up in does not divide neatly into true and false. Some information is deliberately fabricated. Some is inaccurate but shared by people who genuinely believe it. Some is based on a real event but presented without context. Some is an opinion dressed up as fact. Some is speculation. Some is satire that has been mistaken for genuine reporting. Some is generated by AI but presented as genuine. And sometimes something that initially sounds completely implausible turns out to be true.

Our children therefore need something more useful than a simple list of things that are “fake”. They need intellectual habits that allow them to navigate uncertainty. Uncertainty is a feature of the world and does not necessarily mean a failure to understand. Sometimes it simply means that we don’t have enough evidence yet, and that gives us space and time to reflect before deciding what we believe.

One of those habits is learning to slow down and think. The internet is very good at encouraging immediate reactions. We see something that makes us angry, frightened, amused or outraged and our first instinct can be to respond or share it. The information that generates the strongest emotional reaction is often the information that travels furthest and much of the digital environment is designed around capturing and retaining our attention.

A critical thinker learns to create a small gap between encountering something and believing it.

That might mean checking where an image originally came from rather than accepting the caption attached to it, looking for the original study behind a statistic, or checking whether a quotation was actually said by the person to whom it has been attributed and understanding the full context. It might mean reading beyond the headline or looking at several independent sources rather than accepting the first explanation that appears on the screen.

These are practical skills, and they can be taught.

Children can learn to use reverse image searches. They can learn the principle of lateral reading, moving away from a webpage to investigate what other reliable sources say about it. They can learn to distinguish a primary source from somebody else’s interpretation of that source. They can learn that a large number of followers, views or likes is not evidence that something is accurate.

They also need to learn how to use artificial intelligence critically.

AI can be an extraordinary tool for learning, research and creativity, but it is not an authority. An AI system can produce a beautifully written answer that contains factual errors. It can provide a convincing explanation of something it has misunderstood. It can invent references or confidently state something that has no basis in reality. The fact that an answer sounds intelligent does not mean that it is correct.

That creates an interesting opportunity for schools. Rather than simply telling students not to trust AI, we can sometimes use AI to teach them why they should question it. We can give students an AI-generated explanation containing several errors and ask them to find them. We can ask them to verify a quotation, check a statistic or investigate a reference. We can compare an AI response with a reliable primary source and ask students where the two differ.

In doing so, we are teaching something much more important than how to catch an AI mistake. We are teaching children not to outsource their thinking.

I think there are several qualities we should deliberately nurture if we want children to become strong critical thinkers: curiosity, healthy scepticism, open-mindedness, patience, intellectual humility and courage. Curiosity makes a child ask, “Is that really true?” Healthy scepticism makes them look for evidence. Open-mindedness allows them to consider an explanation they had not previously considered. Patience allows them to resist the pressure to reach an immediate conclusion. Intellectual humility allows them to say, “I don’t know.” And courage allows them to change their mind when the evidence changes.

That last quality may be the hardest of all.

We sometimes treat changing our minds as a weakness. In reality, being willing to change your mind because you have encountered better evidence is one of the clearest signs of critical thinking. A child who says, “I thought that was true, but now I know more and I think differently,” has not failed. They have learned.

Ultimately, this is why critical thinking matters so much in a digital world. We cannot tell our children what to believe about everything they will encounter. Nor should we try. They will encounter questions about health, politics, money, science, relationships, society and countless other aspects of their lives. Some of the information they encounter will be accurate, some will be misleading, and some will be deliberately designed to persuade them.

Our responsibility is not to provide them with an answer to every question. It is to help them develop the ability to ask better questions themselves.

In the previous blog, I argued that children need protection as they begin to navigate the digital world. But protection cannot be the end point. As children grow, they need something else from us: the ability to think independently within that world.

They need to be able to pause before they react, question before they accept, investigate before they share and, perhaps most importantly, say, “I don’t know yet.”

Because in a world where almost anyone can create convincing information, one of the most valuable things we can give our children may not be more information. It may be the ability to ask:

How do we know?

And once again, that brings us back to the question of what we want our children to do with the digital world rather than simply what we want to protect them from.

Because eventually, they will have to decide for themselves.