Injustice to the mind

It is quite amazing that one can live past half a century and still fails to analyse things, what a terrible waste of the beautiful mind. During the last module of my course which is the Research Module, we practised critiquing research articles. At class we were asked to critique a certain research article in groups and made presentation later. With the checklist of things to look out for, most groups (if not all) gave rather positive comments, faithfully going through the pointers one by one. However the writer turns out to be quite a frivolous researcher who writes loads of research articles without depth. Fundamentally, we did not researched about him and the publisher.Of course we justified by saying we are layman who are not familiar with medical journals, bla bla bla.
However from this experience, I confirm my suspicion about a characteristic that I have (which hopefully does not apply to others of my age ), that being an innate trust in printed words. I have a naive acceptance of printed forms especially where the article looks stately or officious. I wonder whether this is a conditioning from the school education of my time. Those days education mainly took the form of passing examination which can be quite easily achieved as long as you know your facts through and through in the prescribed textbooks. Thus the belief in every word in print. Unfortunately this extends to the words of truth from the teachers' mouth. It is quite amazing that after all these years I still seldom question the delivery of most teachers, lecturers or trainers in whatever form (other than those bankers in my ex-job who try to educate me in order to sell their product, huh no way).

So equipped with the often preached principle in counselling that you do not tell your clients but must lead them to form their own conclusion, I met with quite a bit of frustration with some clients who may take a lifetime to develop some rationale (often those with less education). So even though I question the universality of this principle I try my best not to deviate. Fortunately after I feedback my feelings to my supervisor and colleagues, they tell me with certain clients I can be directive. See what I mean, only when others say it's OK, I believe it's OK, i.e. I do not trust my own judgement.

I just feel I have kind of done injustice to my mind all these years, never letting it develop. My mind has probably become stunted and very soon will hide either under the pretext of "dementia" or suffer the real onset of it.