As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy' (opens in new tab)

Also because teachers have trouble with it. I’d guess out of all the teachers I had at a decent public school, probably only 1 in 5 could be reasonably considered critical thinkers.

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.

My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them. That said, it's probably reasonable for schools to try to propagate some set of standard ideologies which parents can then modulate by offering their own opinions. The place this probably doesn't work so well is situations where parents are either absent or radicalized in some way. Unsurprisingly, those two situations do seem to be where a lot of social problems originate.

"Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation", argues NYT [1]. I profoundly disagree, but this way of thinking seems to be the modern trend, influenced by postmodernism.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-media-a...

It's also really hard to measure, and just like everything nowadays, there has to be KPIs and metrics everywhere. No one relies on gut feeling or what they think is best anymore, too afraid to stick their neck out without data to back it up, no matter how iffy the data is.

It depends heavily on what you're calling "bad information."

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...

Yep the problem is the so called "bad information" is mostly just stuff the left dislikes due to Trump and not necessarily false. This is easy to see now that Biden is doing just as badly with immigration and even worse is some regards but now suddenly it's not an issue we need to be concerned with.

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.

Citation needed on that "educated, well functioning".

> 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.

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".

What do people use more often to get work done. MS Word or relational algebra?

Those computer classes were actually really useful for me, let me explore power point and was a way to make a video game within PowerPoint, which was super cool.