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Schools to teach children how to spot fake news and ‘putrid’ conspiracies online (www.independent.co.uk)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Hugely agree, those would all be fantastic additions.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

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).