As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'

As Bad Information Spreads, Florida Schools Seek to Teach 'Digital Literacy'(npr.org)

47 points by throwaway1239Mx 5 years ago | 58 comments

lupire 5 years ago |

30 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.

gonehome 5 years ago | |

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.

teucris 5 years ago | | |

> Underpaid, low status jobs

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.

sfblah 5 years ago | |

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.

tastyfreeze 5 years ago | | |

I am sorry that your kids are being indoctrinated with CRT. I will pull my kids from public school before they are "taught" CRT. The goal of a school should be to teach how to think for yourself and provide tools to solve problems. Telling children what they are supposed to think has no place in school.

mastre_ 5 years ago | | |

> 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.

Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?

BitwiseFool 5 years ago | | |

Have you spoken to the school about your concerns? Do your children know about your reservations with what they are being taught?

bad_username 5 years ago | |

"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...

SteveNuts 5 years ago | |

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.

ruste 5 years ago |

I think a component of the issue is that we've spent at least the last decade teaching kids that they should think for themselves as long as what they're thinking is something that an "expert" told them was true. This could not be farther from teaching critical thinking. Primary sources can be wrong. Primary sources can lie. Primary sources can tell the truth, but only the part that supports their argument. There was a great article to this end posted yesterday.

legerdemain 5 years ago |

What you call "bad information" I call "a difference of opinion." And I call your attempts to institute mass re-education in "digital literacy" to "combat" this "bad information" suppression of free thought and oppression of contrarian and non-mainstream voices.

aphextron 5 years ago |

Is this an education problem though? Surely those crowds at the capitol had plenty of well educated, highly functioning adults. But when you incentivize divisiveness to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars in ad revenue, companies like Facebook, grifting media personalities, and corrupted politicians will always collude to outwit them. We have a problem with a runaway hyper-capitalist economic system and decaying democratic institutions that reward manipulative sociopathic behavior.

lupire 5 years ago | |

Citation needed on that "educated, well functioning".

maxfurman 5 years ago | | |

Were they morons? Perhaps. But most of them were what we'd otherwise call "functioning adults," i.e. people with families and jobs. Their only crime was trusting Donald Trump. Well, that and the rioting.

teachtwolearn 5 years ago |

Surprised this isn't more common. I had assumed these classes were already part of most curriculums, because it was taught when kids were in their early-mid teens when I was in primary school ~15 years ago.

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"?

908B64B197 5 years ago | |

> 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".

swiley 5 years ago |

I wonder if this will work out any better than the "computer" classes that teach people to use MS Word (do you really need a class on this?) instead of something they could actually use like an understanding of relational algebra.

germinalphrase 5 years ago | |

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

AnimalMuppet 5 years ago | | |

MS Word, but it pays much less well.

But, por que no los dos? Sure, teach MS Word, and also teach relational algebra.

lordnacho 5 years ago | | |

Purely because they don't know any relational algebra. If they knew both they wouldn't use Word.

Quenty 5 years ago | |

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.

pelasaco 5 years ago |

"The U.S. intelligence community found that in both the 2020 and 2016 elections, Russia employed a range of online methods in an attempt to help former President Donald Trump, and undermine his Democratic rivals, Hillary Clinton and President Biden."

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...

isaacremuant 5 years ago |

The problem with this "bad information" monicker is that it's absolutely contaminated with politics just like "fact checkers" and someone who points out data or inconsistencies that go against an official stance might be labeled simply for countering the narrative.

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.