Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.

I can't help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.

Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright yea

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    having strong reading comprehension and the ability to synthesize/critique based off of that comprehension

    I see plenty of long winded heavily overanalyzed power posters on Reddit. But when they treat the CIA Factbook as gospel and denounce Seymour Hersh as Fake News...

    That's not a comprehension issue. It's a trust issue.

        • panopticon [comrade/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          I'm saying that learning to distinguish garbage from not garbage is an important facet of critical thinking

          • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yes. But those same skills, absent reliable information, can be subverted.

            What you're describing is ultimately just an understanding of institutions. Having a very well refined understanding of libraries doesn't get you useful data if you're trapped in the fiction section.

            Ask Decartes how that works. "What am I able to know is true?" is a very fundamental philosophical question without many bulletproof answers.