30 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.
Also because teachers have trouble with it. I’d guess out of all the teachers I had at a decent public school, probably only 1 in 5 could be reasonably considered critical thinkers.
I’d guess 2 in 5 were actively hostile to the concept and the rest were just ambivalent.
Illegitimate (or at least arbitrary) authority is something schools seem to thrive on. Our school had a staircase you could only go up and one you could only go down and you got yelled at if you went the wrong direction. Naturally the building wasn’t made by insane people so the stairs were on opposite ends, this meant if you had to go downstairs but were near the “up only stairs” you had to traverse the entire building and would be late with 3min class change times (and you couldn’t run either).
We also couldn’t talk during the second half of lunch because it was too loud for the lunch monitors.
Underpaid, low status jobs with unions that prevent people from getting fired is a great way to end up with dumb, awful people in those positions. I was lucky there were a few great teachers at all given those incentives.
To me this is the critical problem. Education is an incredibly important part of a well-functioning society, but we treat teachers very poorly. We need to elevate teachers, both in the training & expertise needed as well as the pay and autonomy we provide them.
Have a basic certification that you can teach vowel sounds.
Bring in plenty of cheap people to lower grades and have them work 1 on 1 with each student.
Seen way to much of teachers teaching to what the kids are supposed to be capable of, vs what they actually are.
I've seen the inside of an elementary grade classroom before, and I agree with you 100%. So many American children and even adults mispronounce vowel sounds, it's scary. Something around 60% of American adults look at a simple word like "iron" and say something that resembles "I yearn." Did no one tell them how it sounds?
Was in a senior in high school French.
Teacher was explaining how to translate present participle.
Complete blank stares.
Only thing anyone knew was noun and verb.
Teacher had a complete meltdown.
So for next week em the entire school, every English class was School house Rock videos.
I trust you pronounce "knight" and "whale" the way that gave them that spelling instead of relying on your inventory of sounds and phonotactics that you picked up from your community of native speakers.
My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them. That said, it's probably reasonable for schools to try to propagate some set of standard ideologies which parents can then modulate by offering their own opinions. The place this probably doesn't work so well is situations where parents are either absent or radicalized in some way. Unsurprisingly, those two situations do seem to be where a lot of social problems originate.
I am sorry that your kids are being indoctrinated with CRT. I will pull my kids from public school before they are "taught" CRT. The goal of a school should be to teach how to think for yourself and provide tools to solve problems. Telling children what they are supposed to think has no place in school.
Please read the rest of my comments on this thread. I don't think you should pull your kids out of school. Simply sit with them and help modulate the information. Learning to operate in the context of CRT is simply part of how their lives will be, assuming they live in / remain in the US.
I did read your comments. And we do provide a wide array of view points. We are currently home schooling because of COVID. However, I will not reward a school district with government funding attached to my children if they are going to be a mouthpiece for political indoctrination. There is danger in allowing CRT to persist in schools. You are able to modulate the ideas for your children. But, the concern, as you have expressed, is that not all parents can do the same or have already drank the kool-aid. The majority of children being taught CRT are not going to be offered modulating ideas. I fear that 20 years down the road as these kids come into power we are in for a new flavor of racist policies driven by the divisive ideas of CRT.
I do agree that the best counter for bad ideas is talking about better ideas and comparing them. Which, to the point of the article, is the crux of critical thinking skills.
I'm not saying that my trek through public school was free of political indoctrination. DARE drug education was pervasive. There is a big difference between "drugs are bad mkay..." and "you're white so you are inherently racist".
I hear you. I just think it's important for my kids to be in contact with the culture, such as it is. I don't envy them having to grapple with the concerns you mentioned. I agree that DARE (which had its share of issues) was a lot less questionable than the current social agenda.
Schools are always mouthpieces. Where I grew up in the 90s in Southern California, the public high school I went to was proud of the fact that they'd figured out a way to have a school-funded evangelical christian club that met weekly on campus (and had hundreds of members). My English teacher taught a class called "Bible as Literature" which was overtly religious even thought it wasn't supposed to be, and she was well-known to be a born-again christian. The P.E. teacher at my public middle school used to make us all stand on our numbers while he told us stories about how Jesus got him through his time in the Marines.
None of this is great, but it's just the way life is, and I believe it's important for my kids to understand, in context provided by my wife and I, how society all fits together. School is an important part of that, in my opinion.
> My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them.
Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?
I'm concerned about saying something political that triggers a flood of downvotes, so I'd rather be pretty vague here. One example is their primary US history textbook is kids version of Howard Zinn's People's History of the US.
I have no problem with Zinn's book in general, but I do think it's best read in the context of knowing the "official" version of history. I normally view his book as a useful critique and extension of a classic history text.
To modulate the Zinn book, I simply review with my kids the relevant Wikipedia entries to ensure they have more context. This works great in my family. My concern would be the outcome in a family without engaged parents or radicalized parents, as I mentioned above.
Children can be taught to believe basically anything, easily. Teaching them to question and then things through comes much later.
Got a a decent dose of class warfare ideology growing up. Spent years after college reading various opinions before finally settling on my own beliefs.
My oldest asks me who to vote for. She gets annoyed when I try and explain the various viewpoints of each candidate, and some pros and cons.
I now firmly hold the belief that it’s immoral to vote if you can’t be bothered to study up on some basics. Like a what is a bond.
I'm not overly concerned about it. It's my job as a parent to modulate the information they receive with school, and I'm fine with that. The most challenging part about it is they are asked to do assignments whose responses contain a strong political element, meaning there is a "right" opinion the teacher wants to hear. Again, that doesn't overly bother me. That's life, and my kids need to learn to operate in politically charged environments.
Yes, my children know what I think, and we discuss everything openly.
You're more at peace with the situation than I would be. I have an angry reaction to the idea that my children are being politically indoctrinated in such an obvious way - especially with such a shaky and activist foundation.
"Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation", argues NYT [1]. I profoundly disagree, but this way of thinking seems to be the modern trend, influenced by postmodernism.
It's also really hard to measure, and just like everything nowadays, there has to be KPIs and metrics everywhere. No one relies on gut feeling or what they think is best anymore, too afraid to stick their neck out without data to back it up, no matter how iffy the data is.
I think a component of the issue is that we've spent at least the last decade teaching kids that they should think for themselves as long as what they're thinking is something that an "expert" told them was true. This could not be farther from teaching critical thinking. Primary sources can be wrong. Primary sources can lie. Primary sources can tell the truth, but only the part that supports their argument. There was a great article to this end posted yesterday.
What you call "bad information" I call "a difference of opinion." And I call your attempts to institute mass re-education in "digital literacy" to "combat" this "bad information" suppression of free thought and oppression of contrarian and non-mainstream voices.
It depends heavily on what you're calling "bad information."
There are certainly cases where there's a difference of opinion - different interpretations of some external reality.
But there is also "bad information" in the form of "literally made up, entirely, with no basis in reality." There exist clickfarms that do literally this - make up fictions for some "legitimate sounding news site" for nothing beyond the ad revenue of driving people to those sites on social media platforms.
"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both secretly space aliens from a satellite orbiting Alpha Centauri and are here to supervise the farming of US citizens to be turned into cattle feed for alien cows" would be the sort of "totally fake" thing I'm referring to - nothing in that statement stands any real chance of being true (I hope... it's hard to outpace reality in absurdity some weeks), but plenty of similarly absurd articles exist on the internet. A lot of them get clicks, some of them get an awful lot of clicks.
Teaching student to be able to properly analyze an information source goes a long way. Though just having the browser warn you when your "news" site was registered last week would also help a lot...
I don't think anyone has a problem with what we might call objective facts.
The issue is that there is a feeling that the 'objective facts' narrative is simply being used as a Trojan Horse to teach things which are much more nuanced (like the effect and pervasiveness of racism), and treating any questioning or disagreement as wrongthink which much be corrected.
Not saying this narrative is true per se, that's just how its being perceived.
World Weekly News still available at your local grocery store checkout as far as I know. That was how I learned what "fake news" was as a kid, the fictional headline you mentioned is totally game for that magazine. In fact most of their covers were some blend of politics, sex, and aliens.
But I'm sure some people believe it or whatever. Doesn't make it anymore credible now that it's on the internet.
The internet has two things World Weekly News doesn't though - scale, and very sophisticated targeting.
A lot of the misinformation in 2016 came from scammers in (I think) Madagascar driving traffic to adfarm blogs with nonsense via FB. They leveraged FB's engagement algorithms to spread viral misinformation to drive traffic. They tried lies targeting the left and the right, but the lies targeting the right spread more easily so they focused attention there.
FB's engagement algorithms leverage confirmation bias in an attempt to spread things the most. I don't think they set out to do this necessarily, but if you measure viral spread and optimize for it - this is what you get.
With political ads, focused targeting at scale is a new type of very effective manipulation that's had a large amount of intellectual capital poured into it. I think it's worth special consideration when considering its effect/risk.
Yep the problem is the so called "bad information" is mostly just stuff the left dislikes due to Trump and not necessarily false. This is easy to see now that Biden is doing just as badly with immigration and even worse is some regards but now suddenly it's not an issue we need to be concerned with.
It's incredibly obvious that even factual information is being regarded as false if it doesn't align with a certain agenda. This is where it gets pretty scary and basically you're telling people you want their children in a re-education camp to make sure they fall in line. It's the opposite of the critical thinking they're supposedly pushing.
I think your comment will be downvoted to invisibility for using the trigger words "Trump" and "the left" but you're not wrong. As a European we experience the political trickle-down of "critical race theory" from the US cultural war even if our history is completely different. And as an outsider, the double-standard in reporting and tone on Trump vs. Biden is disturbing to see.
CRT specifically may be largely junk (I think it is), but the parent comment is not correct.
Trump's "Zero Tolerance" immigration policy intentionally separated mothers and their children at the border with the intent being deterrence. Cruelty was the intended goal of that policy to dissuade people from coming to the border. Previously adults and children would only be separated if border patrol suspected abuse (child trafficking).
Some children have yet to be reunited with their parents (and may never be) because the Trump administration failed to keep records (and frankly didn't care).
The "remain in mexico" policy was intended to prevent those crossing the border to be able to exercise their legal right to claim asylum.
Immigration policy is complex, dealing with desperate people fleeing their country to enter the US is not easy. That doesn't make the Trump administration policy equivalent to the difficulties Biden is experiencing on the border. Intent and policy decisions matter.
This is one specific example, but there are many others.
You realize there are thousands of children being housed without their parents currently right? That's a direct result of Biden making it appear that anyone can just walk right across the border now because he's so friendly and supportive of illegal immigration. In my opinion that's much worse than Trump dissuading people from the start. People are dying and Biden has incited a mass immigration crisis.
Regardless of that specific issue this is the main problem with "bad information". I and many people do not agree with your assessment and I also don't agree you have the right to say definitively what Biden is doing is better and then brainwash our children into believing it by declaring it disinformation when they don't agree.
This quote from the article is enough for me to know it's not about disinformation at all but more about pushing an agenda: "The U.S. intelligence community found that in both the 2020 and 2016 elections, Russia employed a range of online methods in an attempt to help former President Donald Trump, and undermine his Democratic rivals, Hillary Clinton and President Biden." Trump was cleared by the FBI and that investigation returned no evidence to support this. It's equivalent to declaring the election was stolen in 2020 but again we see it's not an issue since it comes from the "chosen" side.
Obama was coined the “deporter in chief” while in office and Biden has similarly said he will deport people who cross the border illegally.
The difference is in intentional cruelty and the policy around how you deal with the problem. Housing minors that crossed without parents is not the same as forcibly and intentionally separating parents and children.
Immigration crisis causes are complex and have to do with the state of countries south of the US. You’d probably agree that Trump’s rhetoric didn’t incite “the caravan” yet they came anyway. Biden’s rhetoric against border crossing has been strict, he’s just not going to violate their rights.
Russia did have a preference for Trump and worked to help him (as detailed in the FBI’s report with lots of evidence to support this). Trump’s actions did not rise to the level of criminal conspiracy, but they did rise to the level of obstruction of justice (also detailed in the report), but ultimately that’s a determination that must be made by Congress to whom the report deferred.
This was a decision made based on an interpretation of fairness based on the OLC opinion (basically that it’d be wrong to assert guilt when you can’t charge). So it was left to Congress to interpret.
When your main point is about determining the validity of information - the specifics are relevant. Specific examples give some ground work to build up priors around accuracy beyond just themselves too.
This doesn't excuse CRT related nonsense which should be similarly thrown out, but it doesn't validate Trump support nonsense either. The specifics matter because otherwise it's just tribal politicking.
The examples you used are not subjective stances - it's possible to learn what the truth is if you're trying to understand it (and aren't just driven by motivated reasoning to defend your specific tribe).
>This doesn't excuse CRT related nonsense which should be similarly thrown out, but it doesn't validate Trump support nonsense either.
And again since you're still avoiding the main issue with defining what exactly "disinformation" is... who gets to decide this and what criteria makes it disinformation is?
A large portion of the population doesn't think CRT is disinformation at all so you don't get to just decide to throw it out. A lot of schools are treating it and aspects of transgenderism as fact. Thinking any of this 'digital literacy' will be based on proven facts is pure ignorance.
Is this an education problem though? Surely those crowds at the capitol had plenty of well educated, highly functioning adults. But when you incentivize divisiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, companies like Facebook, grifting media personalities, and corrupted politicians will always collude to outwit them. We have a problem with a runaway hyper-capitalist economic system and decaying democratic institutions that reward manipulative sociopathic behavior.
Were they morons? Perhaps. But most of them were what we'd otherwise call "functioning adults," i.e. people with families and jobs. Their only crime was trusting Donald Trump. Well, that and the rioting.
Surprised this isn't more common. I had assumed these classes were already part of most curriculums, because it was taught when kids were in their early-mid teens when I was in primary school ~15 years ago.
They called it something like "library technology" at the time, but the topics focused on how to find and vet information online.
This was also when Wikipedia was still new. One of my 8th grade teachers was so annoyed by the platform that they planted false information in the page of a historical figure that we were writing an essay about.
On the one hand, I'm surprised at how creulous the average person seems to be today. But I also felt that way 15 years ago, and how long have people been saying "there's a sucker born every minute"?
> This was also when Wikipedia was still new. One of my 8th grade teachers was so annoyed by the platform that they planted false information in the page of a historical figure that we were writing an essay about.
Someone should have reported the edits and sent the logs to a tech publication. I'm sure they would have loved it.
In all seriousness, I laughed when I saw a "life hack" that basically said: "How to Get Better Grades: Never Quote Wikipedia, Quote the Sources of Wikipedia".
I wonder if this will work out any better than the "computer" classes that teach people to use MS Word (do you really need a class on this?) instead of something they could actually use like an understanding of relational algebra.
I can know as much relational algebra as I like, but I just had a fun interaction with a set of lawyers (in my day-to-day life business, not work) where the Word skills were still necessary.
Those computer classes were actually really useful for me, let me explore power point and was a way to make a video game within PowerPoint, which was super cool.
"The U.S. intelligence community found that in both the 2020 and 2016 elections, Russia employed a range of online methods in an attempt to help former President Donald Trump, and undermine his Democratic rivals, Hillary Clinton and President Biden."
Is this a fact?
If I remember right from the things that I read and listened about it, If Russia was involved, it wouldn't be the first time, and yes, US do the same[1], they didn't want to "help" Donald Trump but instead help themselves, i.e trying to have there the most appropriate candidate to be able to work with (from Russia point-of-view) or/and destabilize U.S.
The problem with this "bad information" monicker is that it's absolutely contaminated with politics just like "fact checkers" and someone who points out data or inconsistencies that go against an official stance might be labeled simply for countering the narrative.
It's easy to believe this doesn't happen when you're always aligning with the official/tech-platform positions but you surely can remember an instance where this wasn't so in the past.
