It's not what you think...

I lived and worked and ran an exploration business in Laos for 15 years. In the later part of that time, I presented a seminar once a year at a local English training college run by Australians with Australian teachers. The seminar was to encourage critical thinking skills. The students were a group of about 20 who had made it through the rigorous selection process for MSc scholarships and were preparing to study in Australia. They were bright kids!

I started the seminar with an introduction of myself as a mineral exploration geologist and that I accepted most people in the general public considered me the left hand of the devil. There seemed to be general agreement on that point... I then proposed to demonstrate that many of the things they understood to be horrible truths about the mining industry would not stand up to even the most basic critical analysis. They simply accepted them because the messages had come from authority figures and the messages had been consistent and told often.

I then used some examples from publicly available data in Laos to show that some of the statements often quoted about the mining industry in the media are patently wrong.

Students were then sent away to search the internet and gather some of their own evidence and examples of statements that might need further critical examination. In the afternoon session we discussed the evidence and questions that they had gathered.

That afternoon session was always quite challenging. No-one likes to be told that something they have believed all their life is a lie, and some of the students became quite uncomfortable when they came close to the point of accepting that reality. I was also quite uncomfortable for me on one occasion when I was verbally attacked by one of the (Australian) teachers who clearly did not accept what I was saying and took a dim view of my attempts to "convert" her students.

Fortunately, the headmaster at the school appreciated the experience gained by the students and for me it was entirely compensated by the look in the eyes of the 10% of students who made the jump to realize that there were two sides to every story and that, thus far they had only been allowed to see one. For them it was clearly an epiphany moment.