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Schools to teach children how to spot fake news and ‘putrid’ conspiracies online
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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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:
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.
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".
Hugely agree, those would all be fantastic additions.
Though I'm not British, I have an interest in your education system because I went to a school that taught, up until year 11, the British education system. Years 10 and 11 were IGCSE, which is an international variant of the GCSE.
But in years 12 and 13 I took the International Baccalaureate. Which I have a lot of praise for in general, but particularly in regards to this aspect. One of the core components of IB that everyone has to take is Theory of Knowledge. It's essentially an introduction to epistemology, including learning about logical arguments...and logical fallacies. It's one of the most broadly useful things you can learn, and I think it should be in every high school curriculum.