Children’s author, Cressida Cowell, has been awarded the Philosophy Now Award for Contributions in the Fight Against Stupidity for her How to Train Your Dragon books. The award honours individuals who have made “an outstanding contribution to combating poor reasoning, unexamined assumptions and entrenched habits of thought”.
Cressida Cowell’s much loved books were praised for containing “startlingly vivid descriptive language” but also for encouraging young readers to reflect deeply on complex emotional, political, historical and moral themes.
On choosing Cowell, the award panel decided that “nothing combats stupidity in the world more effectively than encouraging children to think. Children are great thinkers and their intellectual abilities are all too often underestimated”.
Previous winners of the award have including Noam Chomsky and Raymond Tallis. This is the first time that the award has been given to a children's author.
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The How To Train Your Dragon series is available to borrow from the Discovery Library.