What is critical thinking?
It has now become imperative that adults promote critical thinking for young children. Jeff Share argues that we need to teach them to critique, analyse, and express their own ideas (110). Media literacy must be taught as a process in which critical questioning becomes the core strategy for engaging and decoding these messages (Share 113). The problem is that adults have often felt that there is this need to 'protect' children from the media because it is believed to corrupt them and take away their innocence. This notion must be challenged and overcome if one is to engage in and teach children critical media literacy (Share 130). We cannot deny children, but instead need to provide children with the opportunities to connect the messages that are mediating their culture and everyday lives to their own personal experiences (Share 114). This is critical thinking. In expanding children's vertical deepening, it will ensure that children can question the connections between information, power, and knowledge, and therefore becoming aware of the popular culture that influences them (Share 115). In turn, this will result in child activists who gain agency over their own lives.