Absolutely.

It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.

In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.

https://twitter.com/holden

I used to think this was the answer.

I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.

Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?

I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.

1,000 times yes! In elementary and middle school, I had weekly learning from our school librarian on seeking the truth through a consensus of multiple sources. She taught us how to properly use Wikipedia as a source for finding other sources.

Crash Course (the YouTube channel) published a short series last year on Navigating Digital Information (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSK...). I really appreciated its pointers for how to deal with social media.

I have been wondering how one would teach enough evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to children to make them less susceptible to memetic engineering. Now that we have gone from human marketers to automated systems working to influence purchases and votes, traditional media criticism seems insufficient.

I took a critical thinking class in university, which covered deceptive messaging from advertisements fairly heavily. I'd like to think they all came out of that class no longer able to be fooled by this sort of thing, but I know it isn't the case.

It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.

Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.

I'd agree, with one caveat: there have been plenty of cases where groups push political or other controversial causes via the schools systems (see: the "teach the controversy" and "intelligent design" cases of trying to classify a deistic creation story as backed by science). I can easily see a world where media literacy classes are hijacked to teach the opposite of what ideally should be taught, in order to serve the needs of a few politicians rather than society as a whole.

critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college.

i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.