I’d guess 2 in 5 were actively hostile to the concept and the rest were just ambivalent.
Illegitimate (or at least arbitrary) authority is something schools seem to thrive on. Our school had a staircase you could only go up and one you could only go down and you got yelled at if you went the wrong direction. Naturally the building wasn’t made by insane people so the stairs were on opposite ends, this meant if you had to go downstairs but were near the “up only stairs” you had to traverse the entire building and would be late with 3min class change times (and you couldn’t run either).
We also couldn’t talk during the second half of lunch because it was too loud for the lunch monitors.
Underpaid, low status jobs with unions that prevent people from getting fired is a great way to end up with dumb, awful people in those positions. I was lucky there were a few great teachers at all given those incentives.
To me this is the critical problem. Education is an incredibly important part of a well-functioning society, but we treat teachers very poorly. We need to elevate teachers, both in the training & expertise needed as well as the pay and autonomy we provide them.
Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-media-a...
There are certainly cases where there's a difference of opinion - different interpretations of some external reality.
But there is also "bad information" in the form of "literally made up, entirely, with no basis in reality." There exist clickfarms that do literally this - make up fictions for some "legitimate sounding news site" for nothing beyond the ad revenue of driving people to those sites on social media platforms.
"Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both secretly space aliens from a satellite orbiting Alpha Centauri and are here to supervise the farming of US citizens to be turned into cattle feed for alien cows" would be the sort of "totally fake" thing I'm referring to - nothing in that statement stands any real chance of being true (I hope... it's hard to outpace reality in absurdity some weeks), but plenty of similarly absurd articles exist on the internet. A lot of them get clicks, some of them get an awful lot of clicks.
Teaching student to be able to properly analyze an information source goes a long way. Though just having the browser warn you when your "news" site was registered last week would also help a lot...
The issue is that there is a feeling that the 'objective facts' narrative is simply being used as a Trojan Horse to teach things which are much more nuanced (like the effect and pervasiveness of racism), and treating any questioning or disagreement as wrongthink which much be corrected.
Not saying this narrative is true per se, that's just how its being perceived.
But I'm sure some people believe it or whatever. Doesn't make it anymore credible now that it's on the internet.
It's incredibly obvious that even factual information is being regarded as false if it doesn't align with a certain agenda. This is where it gets pretty scary and basically you're telling people you want their children in a re-education camp to make sure they fall in line. It's the opposite of the critical thinking they're supposedly pushing.
They called it something like "library technology" at the time, but the topics focused on how to find and vet information online.
This was also when Wikipedia was still new. One of my 8th grade teachers was so annoyed by the platform that they planted false information in the page of a historical figure that we were writing an essay about.
On the one hand, I'm surprised at how creulous the average person seems to be today. But I also felt that way 15 years ago, and how long have people been saying "there's a sucker born every minute"?
Someone should have reported the edits and sent the logs to a tech publication. I'm sure they would have loved it.
In all seriousness, I laughed when I saw a "life hack" that basically said: "How to Get Better Grades: Never Quote Wikipedia, Quote the Sources of Wikipedia".
But, por que no los dos? Sure, teach MS Word, and also teach relational algebra.
Is this a fact?
If I remember right from the things that I read and listened about it, If Russia was involved, it wouldn't be the first time, and yes, US do the same[1], they didn't want to "help" Donald Trump but instead help themselves, i.e trying to have there the most appropriate candidate to be able to work with (from Russia point-of-view) or/and destabilize U.S.
[1]: https://news.yale.edu/2020/08/20/rigged-details-long-history...
It's easy to believe this doesn't happen when you're always aligning with the official/tech-platform positions but you surely can remember an instance where this wasn't so in the past.