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?
Been advocating this forever. Teach a boy how to avoid bullshit, he’ll avoid bullshit forever
I’d really like to see the curriculum. And examples.
I feel like this is not an easy task. I suspect if someone thinks it’s not that difficult, then they are not willing to actually use political examples.
But maybe I’m wrong. I just don’t know. When I was in school NOTHING touched actual politics. Maybe that’s why I can’t conceive of how this will work when focused on that topic.
What am I missing?
Edit: When I say politics was never covered, I can give a weird anecdote:
Shortly after high school I was with some friends and asked them about the conservative/liberal thing. And they asked me a few questions and then said I was liberal, I think.
The kicker: one of the two friends went on to be a false elector who signed the documents in my home state on Jan 6th. I saw their name during the hearings.
I haven’t seen the current curriculum but this kind of thing was an area of research for me (the spread of information on social networks).
There was a study done - I want to say that it was about 40 years ago - that used a single lesson to teach young kids the basics of literary criticism and deconstruction so that they could dissect what the Saturday morning cartoon ads were trying to say. They were able to identify that the ads were implying that eating a sugary breakfast cereal would get you more fun friends to play with, and so on. A lot of it had to do with social pressures.
In any case, there was a measurable increase in the kids’ ability to resist being influenced by the ads, once they knew what to look for. I suspect they’ll take a similar approach here.
Nothing is ever going to be 100% successful, but if you pull back the curtain and show them that the Grand Wizard is just a little man pulling their levers, it’ll have a helpful effect on hopefully enough people to matter.
It’s definitely not that difficult.
We had these lessons in Lithuania in the late 90s though not on fake news per se just how to evaluate text sources. It’s the same stuff you get taught for paper writing but in reverse. Check sources and use basic logic.
I don’t think politics are needed to be taught explicitly though, just basic logic concepts. For example, I do wish kids were taught about Baysian perspective outside of math settings. Just understanding that would eliminate a lot of misinformation dangers.
Simply teaching kids that they can’t trust everything they read online is 50% of it. Explaining how and why information gets posted and why anyone might want to share disinformation, how outrage porn manipulates us… now we’re at 75%. The rest is a common sense approach to considering the source of information, understanding a news organization vs. a blog, finding more than one source for information, understanding what Wikipedia is and is not.
This is totally common sense and politically neutral.
The GOP would fight this so hard in red states
Really? Seems like something they’d run with, as long as they got to pick the curricula and decide what the reputable sources are. You could continue to galvanize a base into believing they now DO have critical thinking skills.
It’s a tough one, because there is (at least as of this moment) still such a thing as objective truth. Obviously if they’re just teaching propaganda then yeah it’s bullshit. But if a person is actually given the tools to help them find that objective truth, they will use those tools themselves, and evaluate a source themselves.
A course like this isn’t (or shouldn’t be at least), “these are the right facts, these are the wrong facts,” it’s about teaching a person how to determine that for themselves. And once they do that, you lose control.
Oh absolutely, I just think there’s a difference between an implemented “Critical Thinking” course and an ideal one. But it’s easy for people to call both the same thing.
Well yes, even California is going to decide what to focus on. Which will be mostly politics I’d imagine. Neither one of them is going to focus on who the real problems are: rich people deciding what gets covered so they remain in power.
No way would the GOP fight something that helps more people wake up to the reality that CNN is fake news
It’s a required subject in Finland
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html https://www.nordicpolicycentre.org.au/media_literacy_education_in_finland https://finland.fi/life-society/educated-decisions-finnish-media-literacy-deters-disinformation/
If Finland didn’t educate its children to spot media bullshit, it would be overrun by Russian media bullshit, which devotes no small amount of energy to the task of convincing Finns that they’d be better off as a Russian vassal state.
For that matter, if the US did educate its children to spot media bullshit, our voters wouldn’t fall for such stupid nonsense on the regular
It’s been a few years since I read about this, but Finland also has one of the (if not the) best public education system in the world.
Apparently a couple decades ago (can’t remember exactly how long), Finland was rated very poorly in some worldwide study on public education.
Fellow Americans are going to have trouble grasping this, but that prompted Finland to actually change how their public education system works from the ground up. They did a ton of research and within a few years, they were climbing up that list. It really did not take them very long to correct their very poor public education system, and get to the top.
Finland is obviously much smaller and less populous than the US, but I still believe we can learn a lot from their example.
Instead, we’re going the opposite way… “School choice,” vouchers, charter schools. All that bullshit meant to erode our public education system. Gotta privatize everything!
