Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools::undefined
I like that it’s a critical thinking subject, but it would be much better if you taught generic critical thinking, and used “recognising fake news” as one of the applications for critical thinking.
Every school already teaches generic critical thinking.
Lots of people don’t learn it, but lots of people don’t learn basic algebra either. It’s still taught.
“Write 3 to 5 sentences explaining Gatsby staring across the bay at the green light of the far pier.”
This is a common type of prompt that most school systems use and in theory it fosters and develops critical thinking. Why would Gatsby stare at the light? What must he be thinking about? Why did the author choose a light? But (american) school systems never actually explain what critical thinking is. Only a set of minimum requirements that students struggle through.
I hated those prompts. They seemed like the teacher was just fishing for a specific answer. Sometimes the color doesn’t mean anything and the author thought it just looked nice. It wasn’t until I had a sociology teacher explain it with a poignant example that it really clicked.
He asked us “Is suspending a student good punishment?” He went on to elaborate that a student that skips class gets detention. Well if he skipped class why would he go to detention? So he skips that and gets suspension instead. This student didn’t want to be in school so the school ultimately punishes him by not having him in school.
Reductive and simplistic, sure. But the idea that you approach a problem or thought from many different angles to see all facets of it didn’t really gel with me until that moment. We need more of that. We need the “why” of critical thinking.
What would “generic” critical thinking even look like? You need some subject matter to apply critical thinking skills to. News is already a very, very broad subject. What kind of critical thinking do you think is important but not teachable in the context of news?
Teaching about logical fallacies, how the scientific method is supposed to work, etc.
Not so much that it couldn’t be taught in the context of news, but there are far more areas where critical thinking is needed.
Yes. In college libraries I remember opening handbooks on critical thinking and they were as you said.
Here is one that is available online for free as an open access PDF and has all of the best and current science on many aspects of rationality from cognitive science to philosophy: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/5525/The-Handbook-of-Rationality
I agree. That’s what I learn when I was in school. We also had to identify objective and subjective texts
Here’s the syllabus for the Cambridge Critical Thinking AS & A level
https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/Images/597412-2023-2025-syllabus.pdf
They used to offer it as an end of GCSEs subject in grammar schools in the UK when i were younger (Maybe they still do, i don’t know). My Ex took it.
I (a pleb) went to a plebs school though so didn’t get the opportunity
it would be much better if you taught generic critical thinking
That’s pretty much what you get from an English (or history) class in HS. Can you extract information from a text, can you synthesize information from multiple sources, can you interpret what the text means and support your interpretation based on evidence, can you understand motivations and perspectives of characters, and recognize information from unreliable narrators, etc.
Sometimes when a problem becomes immediate enough, teaching the general case isn’t enough. Not sure whether we’ve reached that point, but there’s a lot of general teaching that people complain isn’t specific enough. “Why don’t they teach how to do taxes?”-- because they teach math and following directions, and it theoretically shouldn’t be more complicated than that.
Except education is not general, it is hyperfocused on topics that lead into higher education.
I can agree with that to a certain extent, but how is math not general? How is understanding characters from a book not general?
