Don't Tell Me Libraries Are Obsolete

Because, you see, it's the last place left where we have a chance to teach some semblance of critical thinking skills, now that we have elided them from the more general educational curriculum:

Consider the efforts of Frances Harris, librarian at the magnet University Laboratory High School in Urbana, Illinois. (Librarians are our national leaders in this fight; they’re the main ones trying to teach search skills to kids today.) Harris educates eighth and ninth graders in how to format nuanced queries using Boolean logic and advanced settings. She steers them away from raw Google searches and has them use academic and news databases, too.

But, crucially, she also trains students to assess the credibility of what they find online. For example, she teaches them to analyze the tone of a web page to judge whether it was created by an academic, an advocacy group, or a hobbyist. Students quickly gain the ability to detect if a top-ranked page about Martin Luther King Jr. was actually posted by white supremacists.

Read Thompson's whole piece here. I won't go so far as to say that the rise of information technology is making us stupid; but I will say that it is most certainly allowing us to become less discriminating, less mentally acute, and overall a society of the intellectually lazy and gullible.