The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That’s good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.
AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn’t enough. There’s another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don’t want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.
This is a positive thing. I hope more governments do this, especially in South America, it could reduce the severity of anti-government protests fueled by outside campaigns.
change the school curriculum so English schoolchildren are taught critical thinking skills
Is this… not currently taught?
It is conveniently left out in many large countries, one wonders what motivation they might have to skip on this skill?
The motivation centers around capitalism. Critical thinkers aren’t going to reach for their wallet every time they see a stupid advertisement featuring dancing penguins. As a bonus to the corporatocracy, the brain dead electorate with no critical thinking skills vote for the people who will make their life worse.
Tbh considering how it is a method, not a subject really, I think it is indirectly taught in so many subjects: math, literature, philosophy, biology, physics and more.
I really don’t see the point of teaching it as a standalone subject, although I would be curious to see how that works.
It’s kind of implied rather than explicitly taught, and even then only really in certain subjects after those subjects become optional.
The misanthrope in me questions how many of the people in the mobs paid attention in school in the first place. You can’t just hammer stuff into kids heads, you need to inspire them to love learning and I doubt we will be getting that.
I’m highly skeptical of teaching critical thinking, personally. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
It would be hypocritical if you forced them to accept what you were teaching without questioning it. No good education institution behaves that way.
The thing I always think about when someone says misinformation is who decides. The ministry of truth?
Critical thinking means that you have the right tools to decide yourself if something is misinformation or not
Use your words, mate – what exactly do you think is wrong with teaching critical thinking skills? Do you understand that they’re not going to just “say something is misinformation” but teach kids to be able to evaluate whether something is likely going to be bullshit or not, among other skills?
