Children will be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online under planned changes to the school curriculum.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”.
Pupils might analyse newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help weed out fabricated clickbait from true reporting. In computer lessons, they could be taught how to spot fake news sites and maths lessons could include analysing statistics in context.
As always, things will focus more on vibes and credentialism than critical thinking, because conspiracy theories are a mainstay of all the 'serious' papers and conspiracy itself is just how power has functioned for the last few centuries
There's two kinds of conspiracies:
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Ultimately antisemitic nonsense
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Admitted to by the government thirty years after the fact
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This is actually a very minimal change to the already existing curriculum - the (compulsory) English Language GCSE is 50% "Critical reading and comprehension"
Gov UK states all specifications must include:
"identifying bias and misuse of evidence, including distinguishing between statements that are supported by evidence and those that are not; reflecting critically and evaluatively on text"
Most people presumably... "forgot"? but this has been in the curriculum for decades
For me at least, most of that was just identifying rhetorical devices used by the writer and summarising what they wrote, not looking at the legitimacy of what's being said (it'd be hard to do that in an exam context anyway).
Yeah, there's definitely a difference between curricula, what's focussed on in classrooms, and exam assessment criteria, but they're supposed to be cohesive.
I remember one of my big pieces of coursework was "writing from the perspective of an advertiser," and we had loads of lessons on identifying bias. I was taught in school that "red top magazines" are "less honest and more emotive" than "broadsheet newspapers."
Presumably not everyone had the same experience though: I mentioned this offhand and my friend told me "surely that's illegal to teach in a classroom?!"
I think a lot of what people are missing is around spoken techniques.
- Recognising ad hominem attacks.
- Recognising straw-man arguments.
- Recognising circular reasoning.
- Spotting embedded assumptions or premises in points.
- Being numerically literate enough so that big numbers have context.
Yes, these things apply to texts also, but they can fly past you when somebody is speaking. You can't take 30 seconds to notice that somebody is arguing against something which wasn't said by the opposition. It has to be a reflexive "hang on a minute! That's BS".
What my Dad always called "the elastic curriculum" - some politician gets a bug up their ass and demand schools teach it (eg BoJo and Latin). At least this weaves through different subjects so could be made to work. Still, it must be a bit difficult to teach critical thinking in religious schools.
And that’s why religious schools need to stop, and the Church of England needs to be disestablished.
This is good, but they could really do with running these for older people too.
Here's one I heard this week for example:
"My friend down at the bowls club said on Facebook that they're not even real immigrants, but they're special forces soldiers from the secret UN Army and they're bringing them over here to take over the British and they've all got really good shoes and mobile phones you see, that's how you can tell and they're all of fighting age aren't they?"
I guess the issue would be that they would be voluntary for older people and the type who believe those conspiracies wouldn’t think they need them.
