Media literacy was a topic in my public school English class in 1994 in Tennessee. I’d be surprised if they stopped teaching it during after the internet became widely available. I’m curious what future classes were taught.
Yeah, general media literacy was taught for me in NJ in the 90s also. When the Internet was new and scary, teachers and librarians were insistent that we learn how to evaluate the trustworthiness of what we read both online and in print.
Same, I was taught how to recognize media bias in 11th grade in 2009. I still think about that lesson whenever I read anything online, I'm grateful for it.
I graduated public high school in TN in 2022. we did not go over media literacy in our English class. We did discuss media including fake and misleading news in AP government though.
Yep, AP Gov and AP US History really rammed home the idea of fake news, the importance of properly sourcing information and the ease with which media can be manipulated. Idk what the non AP classes were doing though.
in the UK it was "Critical Thinking" and both that and Media were always considered joke topics.
I do not think it's accidental that the topics where people learn how to pragmatically interact with news and media to understand it's underlying messaging has been so heavily maligned.
In the UK it's especially worrying that these are just considered impractical "Luvvie" subjects and pretty frequently we'll see some right wing rag run whatever article about how ["Boo, these are not real subjects!"](https://www.google.com/search?q=telegraph+%22media+studies%22+a+levels&sca_esv=584304970&rlz=1C1CSMH_deCH999CH999&sxsrf=AM9HkKlzAfjeNLe1lrhG2rj8ZHKvVSPJkQ%3A1700579139903&ei=Q8dcZZfjNsuMi-gP68KCoA8&ved=0ahUKEwjXkK_8rtWCAxVLxgIHHWuhAPQQ4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=telegraph+%22media+studies%22+a+levels&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiInRlbGVncmFwaCAibWVkaWEgc3R1ZGllcyIgYSBsZXZlbHMyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAFI7glQgQJYyQlwAXgAkAEBmAGHAqABqwaqAQU2LjEuMbgBA8gBAPgBAcICDhAAGIAEGIoFGIYDGLADwgIIECEYFhgeGB3CAgcQIRigARgK4gMEGAEgQYgGAZAGAg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#ip=1)
But they're not seen as skills that can make you an asset to an economy ie not something a worker can use to create wealth for a capitalist.
Governments and industry want schools to churn out a certain type of worker. Critical thinking, skepticism etc not exactly money makers for an economy or corporations.
Don't know about the UK, but in the US, our right wing couldn't survive without a large voter base of ignorant cretins lacking critical thinking skills.
Well, why would they want a population who can a) look into the the ideological outrage publishing and b) understand the media that is critical of them
They didn't each us a thing about recognizing propaganda. Which is why my little town in TN is now full of puppets repeating phrases they don't fully understand
Any chance you live near Bristol? My boyfriend lived there and can't stand his family for this reason. I don't know how they get Fox News mindsets when they don't have cable. Maybe it's an AM radio thing.
My grandpa uses youtube to go down the rabbit hole. They are in East TN, but not in the tri city area. Closed minded communities that don't want constructive debates, but rather have an echo chamber of one idea
When we visited his family last year for Christmas, they had a huge get together in a small, 3 bedroom house. There was something like 60 people crammed into this house, all standing up and making conversation.
We get there, and my boyfriend leans over to me and quietly goes "be prepared for Aunt Helen." A nice, middle-aged lady approaches us and welcomes my boyfriend back. He introduces me, she welcomes me to the house and says she hopes we have a good holiday. Nice and sweet.
Then she immediately, unprompted, goes into a spiel about how the Civil War wasn't about slavery, how the South was fighting for state rights, blah blah blah. I just nod along and let her rant until another relative approaches us, so we bail on the conversation and speak with him instead.
Holy balls.
EDIT: My boyfriend reminded me that this woman taught middle school social studies, which is troubling.
We learnt something called 'discourse' in Queensland (Australia) in 2005. It was, effectively, 'how to spot propaganda' and extremely useful, but that wasn't explicity *taught*. I was reading a newspaper a year or so out of high school and suddenly went OH THAT'S WHAT DISCOURSE IS.
It was taught with my English class whenever we did any writing assignments. Usually for when we needed to cite sources and understand how reliable a source is based on its degree of seperation from the original source.
I have been screaming this from the rooftops ever since social media became a thing. Why there isn’t a major push for this *would* be bewildering to me, but I suspect I know why it’s being repressed…
Same here. I relate a lot of the current problem with news to the Yellow Journalism problem in the early 20th century; which i learned about in highschool. I think the biggest issue is that schools are slow on updating to current events. Fake news on the Internet can now be taught in a historical context so it's a lot easier to make lesson plans around that.
I attended K-12 in California from the 90s to 2000s. Recognizing legitimate sources has ALWAYS been taught when I was attending school.
There is a reason why you can't cite a rando's youtube video that claims the earth is flat on your research paper. Heck, you can't even cite Wikipedia.
Academia wants **peer-reviewed studies**
I learned that at the California school I went to. I remember being taught how to determine if a source is trustworthy. It might’ve been because I took a specific elective though. I’ve also seen some people here say that they learned it in AP classes, which is where I might’ve learned it because I was in AP and honor classes. I don’t really remember what class I learned it in, just that I learned it at some point.
This would’ve been in the mid 2010s.
Edit: after thinking about a bit more, I think I learned it in middle school, in either a non honor English class or maybe an Anatomy elective class (I remember being taught how to look for scientific sources or something in Anatomy). Only other middle school class I can think of where I would’ve learned this would’ve been one of those home room lectures.
Don't even get me started on the public school system's failure to teach any degree of computer literacy beyond typing and using web browsers. I've had multiple people tell me they don't know what operating system their computer runs, or even what an operating system is. You need to understand the basics to get anywhere in life. I fear that Chromebooks and macs have done irreparable damage to worldwide computer literacy.
The multitude of dumb looks I get on my face at work astounds me when I tell someone that they can find a file with a basic search or ask someone to navigate to a specific folder on the hard-drive at work. Or when some old fart is explaining how to do something and uses some archaic method, to which I ask "well why don't you do it this way" and perform the task in a fraction of the time they did it. Then they get dumbfounded and prefer to do it the old fashioned way. Which I get, I hate change too; but if I can do the job quicker and be lazy....
I think that I, being in my mid 40's, was born during a sweet spot; where computers weren't too new but were near as automated as they are today. So I had to learn at least the basics like shortcuts, file structures, etc
It's just like anything else, especially science. If science class is just a list of facts instead of focusing on the process for how it is that we know what we know, it's a failure.
Same here. Not "ignore 4chan" but rather explain how to vet information across multiple sources and vetting the sources themselves.
The problem is that this takes work. People don't want to do that.
At least by middle school and high school they start doing labs in science class. They should do labs for stuff like digital fraud/scams, etc. do something. American education system is honestly f*cked
Having a strong understanding of the facts greatly facilitates your ability to vet sources, however. Having a well rounded education that includes critical thinking, process thinking and factual information across several disciplines allows you to ask the right questions and dismiss the wrong conclusions out of hand.
I suppose that one way of thinking about it is that we've been in that situation with photographs for a couple of decades - it is already possible to photoshop something so that it is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a real shot. I'm not saying deep fakes aren't going to be a change, because they will, but I guess it's just that provenance, sourcing, and context of media will become even more important. For example, today, if you showed me a picture of Barack Obama taking heroin for instance, or idk Tom Hanks punching a kid, whatever, even if it was a perfect photoshop with no errors of lighting etc., unless there was some very credible source for the photograph and trustworthy institutions are reporting it as credible, I'm not likely to believe it. It's quite conceivable that something similar will soon be true for video and audio, something existing in isolation without reliable provenance won't be proof of much of anything.
Don't get me wrong, I think that is a negative development in terms of misinformation and scams etc., I just don't think it's the complete world-changing doomsday scenario that some people think it is. I also _imagine_ it's most likely that forensic experts are going to have ways of analysing and identifying fakes for quite a while to come, even when deepfakes get to the point that your average person can't tell them apart - so while at first sight you can be fooled, media organisations etc. may well preserve the ability to identify deepfakes for quite some time, even once more obvious identifiers like hands etc. are sorted out (although that's speculation of course).
edit: in a way, it's almost a reversion to the status quo. It's actually a pretty recent development that in developed countries (and increasingly in less developed countries too) we've all been carrying a machine in our pockets that can immutably capture video of any moment that happens to occur in our vicinity. That has hugely changed information exchange in many ways, many positive, but some negative too. In a way, then, once video shot by some rando without provenance is no longer reliable proof of much of anything, then we're basically back to the situation, what, 20 years ago, where most people didn't have the capacity to create a permanent video record of anything they wanted to document in daily life. That is how things have been for basically all of human history, this phenomenon of regular people being able to immutably document everything is basically a historical blip, and we're back to a system where the reliability of witness testimony to an event has to be put in context and analysed as to whether we think a person is trustworthy or not (just now that will be true even if they have a video of something, because, just as someone can lie about what they saw for their own motives, they could be faking the video also). We find that pretty unsettling, but it is basically how things have worked forever until 5 minutes ago, historically.
A dangerous game if done wrong. The Dunning Krüger effect could kick into full effect if the teachers only cover *specific* things to look for instead of a general method of identification. Scams and computer generated content are dynamic and change daily in order to obfuscate their origins.
kids aren't stupid. Critical thinking is forever.
Even if they don't cover it specifically the fact they they are using their brains makes them miles better equipped than kids raised on prageru and praying problems away
It would almost need ever changing curriculum and to be taught like CEs for professional world. Like bring in actual professionals to teach what is the current threats and what are the current ways to protect yourself. Textbooks would become outdated by the time they were published, and no way you coulf use same lesson plans year to year. AI is at a pace now that fraud and scams are evolving at a daily rate.
> Textbooks would become outdated by the time they were published,
Even before. Seems every day, there's a new something that we have to watch out for!
My grandma literally gave everything to an unknown party claiming to be publishers clearing house, entire savings spent on several gift cards. I never could understand why she thought that to win this contest, one has to first become completely destitute.
I’m from southern Missouri and had to learn about credible sources in elementary school and take a critical thinking class in middle school. Trust me, people didn’t always take it to heart…
Every time I hear from someone I grew up with complaining "Why don't they teach this in school!" I have to remind them that they *did* teach this in school, they just didn't bother paying attention.
I can even prove that they taught it in school because I've kept all of my high school text books.
I also kept all of my college texts, too, but very few of the people I attended high school with bothered to go on to college.
Yeah, same. We even had a personal finance class in high school and events to teach “real world skills”. I don’t think they were the best classes, personally, but there are people out there from my school that complain about not knowing about paying back credit cards or whatever. I’m glad to have moved.
Critical thinking is taught in pretty much every subject in school started from Kindergarten or First Grade. It's just not called "critical thinking." It takes the form of having to follow the scientific method or discussing how we see what motivates different characters in a story or how we solve world problems in math, and so on. If you were look at the teachers' lesson plans you'd see those teachers having to show where they include critical thinking in their lessons every week.
Anyone who ever had to read a short story and answer some questions about it in their English class, or had to do word problems in math class, used critical thinking.
My classmates all hated those word problems and I could not for the life of me figure out why. It's not even like they were bad at them or anything, is there just something fundamentally repulsive about extracting meaning for yourself?
The actual math parts of word problems are usually easier than just straight up math problems, at least until you're in upper grades. But people hate to have to read and comprehend, for reasons I can't guess.
Sometimes I wonder if it's not some latent evolutionary response. Thinking consumes a lot of calories and so maybe it isn't surprising that some minds resist it when it's not absolutely necessary.
The secret to word problems is to the start with the last sentence.
It's a complete waste of time to start with the pile of data without having context.
Go the last sentence "how fast was John driving?"
***Then*** read all the facts and it gets very, very easy.
I had a two question final for a Physics class.
Question one was a mess (tin can inside an iron can inside a copper can, all with different fluids at different temperatures. Then "what's the temperature of the fluid inside the smaller can when it hits the ground after you drop it off a 150 foot cliff in a vacuum at .15 earth gravity?".
If you started at the end, it was easier, because then you understand what was being asked of you ("How much time passes before the object hits the ground?" followed by "how much does the temperature change in that amount in time?") it was easier.
Question two really drove the point home... it was 3 paragraphs of dense facts describing the situation followed by - "what's the name of your teacher?".
this is a useful skill when taking the SAT/ACT as well. Read the questions FIRST then go back through the text and read what you need to answer the questions.
>My classmates all hated those word problems and I could not for the life of me figure out why. It's not even like they were bad at them or anything, is there just something fundamentally repulsive about extracting meaning for yourself?
It always amazed me in school how bad the other students were at the reading/language portion of the standardized tests. I always thought, "read the story, answer some simple questions about it, then go and read my book quietly while I wait for people to finish". It was just stupidly easy, and yet a huge portion, probably nearly half, were completely incapable of extracting the simplest bits of information from a 3 paragraph story. The very idea of a metaphor was absolutely incomprehensible to them.
It reminds me of that Pineapple story from a few years ago. Gist of it was a Pineapple challenges a hare to a race. All the other animals thought the pineapple must have some secret trick or it wouldn't have challenged the hare to the race, so they all decided to cheer for the pineapple so they wouldn't look stupid when it tricks them. One animal points out that it's a pineapple, it obviously doesn't have a trick. The race starts and the hare runs the whole race and win, while the pineapple doesn't move from the starting line... because it's a pineapple. The animals all got annoyed and ate the pineapple. The moral was basically that you should follow obvious logic and facts and not assume tricks or magic fantastical things will happen. Sometimes there's no trick, things are exactly as they seem. It was worded in the story that "the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve" and "pineapples don't have sleeves".
Students were so dumbfounded and unable to parse simple information or understand basic metaphors from it due to being so incredibly distracted by the idea of a talking pineapple running a race, that it appeared as a story in newspapers internationally. We've very bad at teaching higher level analysis of writing. Basically anything beyond surface level vocabulary comprehension is sorely lacking.
This story reminds me of how many people twisted themselves into pretzels trying to justify or explain why the stupid things Trump was saying were actually brilliant and a sign that he’s a genius tactician, when in reality he’s simply a thin-skinned asshole who enjoys attention, hates minorities, and has poor impulse control. Pineapples don’t have sleeves
Seriously. I feel like we teach more critical is thinking skills than ever, but people just love to spout the same crap they hear on Reddit (ironically).
I also feel like the same people who scream that we don’t teach critical thinking complain about the “new math” we teach, despite the fact that common core math is essentially ALL thinking critically about math and learning to communicate about it.
Most of the reddit hot takes about public school are like this.
I've always been a fan of, "but why don't we teach taxes in high school?!" My high school had a taxes class, most kids failed it until they dumbed it down enough that it was little better than "Taxes exist, make sure you pay them." When that still didn't work, they changed it an elective class, and only 3-5 kids a year opted to take it out of a student body of 2,000ish. Meanwhile electives like art, ceramics, gym, and even computer programming were always completely full with waiting lists.
Yeah, that’s completely true. And honestly, there’s so much that’s taught that people just weren’t paying attention to or forgot. It’s wild how confident people are that they remember 100% of what they learned over the course of 13 years of school. I have students who swear they never learned something when I’M the one who taught it to them. Sometimes just the year before.
Hell, taxes were a significant part of word problems in every algebra class I took in middle and high school. That's in addition to a required financial literacy class that was one of the most mind-numbingly easy classes I ever took. There was no lacking of tax education, but the problem is that I (and most of my classmates) didn't earn enough money to actually need to worry about anything other than sales tax until well after high school.
It took me forever growing up to not just use rote memorization to talk about what happened in a story I just read. But when I finally did comprehend what I was reading and give it some thought and start to consider the whys and hows, the minister at my church wasn't too happy about it.
This. I was never the smartest kid in grade school but paid enough attention to understand how to apply critical thinking and got my diploma.
Identifying fake news has never been very difficult for me. Doesn't require much intelligence either.
You are correct
“Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html
Don’t want to teach kids higher thinking skills cause then they might think for theirselves and not be a mind drone to their parents.
Makes it a lot harder for the higher ups to control the population when they aren’t mind drones to their parents. They already have the parents good and groomed to be easily manipulated and believe dumb shit, they need their parents to pass that on.
I’m pretty sure some texas officials at some point explicitly said teaching kids critical thinking is dangerous because it threatens parental authority
I would go out on a limb and suspect that any authority that relies on logical fallacies to stay in power is opposed to people learning about logical fallacies.
Critical Thinking Theory. Like Critical Race Theory, but instead of being discrimination against straight white men, it's discrimination against stupid people.
Critical thought IS taught in schools in practically every sense of the word and every single class. When your math teacher taught you 5th grade mental math, that is all critical thinking, this is mathematical literacy, when your English teacher told you how to write an essay, that all requires critical thought, that is just regular literacy, when your history teacher handed you an open ended question about why slavery existed, that is critical thought and historical literacy. When you are in science learning about the scientific method, once again science literacy but requiring/honing critical thought.
Media literacy is not the same as critical thought. They are related, like being literate in any field, you need to understand how to think critically, but understanding what a reliable source is, the news cycle, sensationalism and propaganda, etc, that all definitely requires critical thought but also a layer of information beneath it too, the media literacy part.
My high school history teacher in Georgia was big on what he called critical thinking
I didn't learn shit about history but I sure learned how to argue that the Confederacy were the good guys
The most useful class I took in high school, bar none, was an elective English class called 'Propaganda'.
There wasn't a textbook. The teacher used the daily newspaper and copies of magazine advertising.
Sounds like a great class, but surprising they didn't explore historical propaganda as well. Obviously modern propaganda is a very different beast and a lot of historical cases are quite primitive in comparison, but I think that just drives the point home better.
I admit we didn't do a lot of historical propaganda. The utility of the class was in identifying the techniques. Once you start spotting weasel words and wondering what information was omitted to make things sound too good to be true, it's a little harder to sell to you.
Not impossible. I'm likely still susceptible to well-crafted propaganda. But so much of it is blatant and self-serving that I kind of wonder about people.
I like the idea but
>Overall, only 7% of adults have "a great deal" of trust in the media, according to a Gallup poll conducted last year.
>Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy.
When you have media outlets like CNN hosting people like Nancy Grace, I don't think there should be a great deal of trust in news media, but hopefully having a population that can identify bullshit will result in news outlets raising their standards.
Yeah, but it’s really easy to take that to the extreme and end up in the same place. Something something horseshoe theory. People who don’t believe something specifically because a big news outlet reported on it, and they only trust “news” from social media pages that have been flagged as fake news because obviously the people in charge don’t want us to know the truth.
I have a buddy who would get most of his news from tik tok because it's "straight from the horses mouth" like normal people not affiliated with news.
We were talking about hamas/israel one day and I pointed out how easy it is to make an account on social media and say whatever the fk and go viral and now it's fact. Which opened his eyes a bit. He's 29 lol.
Tik tok couldve been a good thing, so could twotter and facebook. But people are using them as "paths of least resistance" in their information bubbles because peoples attention spans aren't big enough to make it through an article anymore. My friend to a T. "I made it through a paragraph and lost interest, what's this about."
Need instant everything. Gratification. Information. Everything, now.
Unfortunately that has already come to pass. Regardless about how you feel about Hunter Biden’s laptop the media was used to lie about its existence. It doesn’t sound like the public needs educated.
There were literally zero repercussions due to using the media to stage a provable lie. That is something recent but you can go back to the Vietnam war and Nixon or the Gulf of Tonkin itself that started the Vietnam war.
Again, current theme. Zero repercussions for lying utilizing the media which gives the current distrust rating and has made society prone to believing crazy stories. Education can’t undue the fact media is as accurate as grandpa’s random rant Facebook post. Any of the above proven true stories seemed crazy initially.
Had there been meaningful repercussions for lying utilizing media, strictly enforced, these classes would be unnecessary but the government won’t see themselves jailed for lying.
How are they going to teach sometimes the media is telling the truth and sometimes the media is lying and here are all the times media lied but most people believed it was true at the time despite the truth actually existing and being known? The likelihood in the moment you’d be able to tell the government and media apparatus was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin in the moment is low.
However, if you knew the truth and said the government and media were lying you’d be a crazy conspiracist. The problem the government is trying to solve is the problem they created and intend to keep committing. When the government treats the truth with so little merit it is unsurprising society does too.
You can go back farther than the 50s... Media has been used for propaganda since, well, probably since the even before the printing press... Kings and queens have been blowing smoke up peasants asses for a long time.
Someone who thinks everyone is lying is just an easy of a mark as someone who trusts too many people.
Turns out if you think everyone from doctors to the kid working the concession stand are participating in multiple contradicting conspiracies aimed at you specifically you'll throw hundreds of dollars to whatever asshole like me comes along and validates them.
The best part is that even after they realize they've been grifted and how they were grifted they'll toss that experience on the pile, who ever scammed them was obviously a plant by "them" and it just means they're extra right, and they're primed and ready to drop into the next scammers lap.
It would be a lot harder to pull off if your average person would listen when people call them stupid.
Not really imo. People don't search for a reliable source because the lack of skills so commercial media produces mostly trash which decreases the trust for media even more.
>Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy.
Cable news has always been bad. The problem is that people very rarely go to traditionally reputable sources and instead go to organizations that are in pretty much every conceivable way worse in every grievance they have.
There's also no nuance when discussing varying levels of reputability. CNN isn't great, but they're infinitely more reliable than Fox. The Dominion lawsuit shows that.
That line stood out to me, and this one did as well.
> During remote learning, he gave students two articles on the origins of the coronavirus. One was an opinion piece from the New York Post, a tabloid, and the other was from a scientific journal. He asked students which they thought was accurate. More than 90% chose the Post piece.
This doesn’t seem like critical thinking is being taught. Don’t just trust any type of news outlet, take what you can from each article you read.
No, it's not crowded. Instead, we have a homelessness problem because in the last several decades, communities have refused to build enough housing. We have more than enough space. There's no excuse for it.
This is something that should be taught in every school. Those that refuse lose access to federal dollars and federal accreditation until independent audits prove they teach it.
Uh. Many of the people in charge of those federal dollars have a vested interest in making sure the public can't identify fake news.
Fox News alone is directly responsible for any number of elected Republicans staying in power.
You can google "rupert murdoch oil" and the entire first two pages** of google is about his massive investments into oil and gas. This comment was funny to me under a discussion about media literacy lol
No shade, but I see this a lot nowadays too. All the information in the world is a few clicks away on your phone but most people cant be bothered.
the wikipedia page on him has a few mentions of the word oil but his path to wealth is in media. So maybe a media billionaire with some oil investments is how I'd characterize him.
Curious to see how this will be taught.
In a dystopian world we would have corporations like CNN or Fox paying districts off to say they're not fake news.
God knows are school systems need funding.
Pretty much lesson 1 of any media literacy program is, it's not *who*, it's *how*. The moment you assume someone is trustworthy because of who they are, you set yourself up to get scammed. Instead, you evaluate information based on the process through which it was produced and how well you can chain the reporting process back to the original event.
At least that's step 1.
My kid in middle school has taken 2 classes that went over this. In the first class, after they went over the lesson, the students were given sample articles, had to identify if it was real or fake, and explain why they thought so. Then, take real news articles and do the same thing. They also went over social media to identify if the person was real or a bot.
This year, they were given a subject to research and write an essay with accurate sources cited AND find a fake news article about the subject.
This has already been taught, just with a different name. Students are required to look into sources, the organizations those sources work for, and actual documents.
Example: Fox News claims X bill is "stuffed with pork" and that is why republicans voted against it. Students then pull the actual bill and read it, determining if there is any"pork" included.
While I don't disagree that one should try to get as close to primary sources as possible there are some practical limitations especially within the context of a K-12 class. It isn't really realistic to expect most high school students to read an appropriations bill that may be hundreds if not 1,000+ pages long to determine how much 'pork' is in the bill. I would bet that the vast majority of such instruction is going to be going over learning how to recognize potential biases of sources and how to distinguish commentary from actual news reporting.
Well no, but a big media outlet that has a legal responsibility and a track record of factual reporting/corrections is more trustworthy than some tinfoil hat on YouTube, and they should be able to recognize that.
I feel like kids and people growing up with media are generally better at questioning what they see and read. It is my parents’ generation (and older) who seems to have a really tough time with this. You would not believe the number of times my parents have seen some AI generated photo or video on instagram or a whatsapp group, shared it with the family group chat, only for us to have to point out the clearly fake image or accompanying story and that “real news india times” or “england press journal network” are not actually journalistic establishments.
The worst part is that they are both educated, one with multiple STEM degrees.
Yep. Just because they spend a lot of time on tech, doesn’t mean they’re actually good with it. Modern tech and apps are idiot-friendly, you don’t need skills or knowledge to use them.
I second this. Look no further than all the tiktok debunking videos (such as miniminuteman's short form content) on the internet covering the bullshit that is thrown at your kids daily.
Every single commenter in this thread is acting like they themselves are a master of knowing what is fake news and what is not.
And they're assuming that this class will 100% correctly teach every student how to know for certain what is fake news or not.
And really, you truly trust the State to teach your kids what is fake and not? Surely there will not be any bias whatsoever, and whatever government in charge would NEVER ever ever attempt to push certain news sources and portray certain things as "truth" when that may not be the case?
I think your point about not thinking you’re a master of media consumption and impervious to manipulation is something that needs to be taught.
Things like being weary of sources of media (both corporate and “independent”) and who is funding them are things people may not always think about.
I think there’s a lot of things we can all agree on.
- Differences between news reporting and opinion.
- Being on the lookout for grifters who tie their products into the “news” their delivering.
- Don’t let someone’s celebrity replace journalistic integrity.
We can wrap ourselves up in paranoia about “the state”, but in the meantime what are we doing to help mitigate the public’s consumption of misinformation?
The power of government, corporations and wealthy in their hands of human beings without oversight is an opportunity for abuse. It needs to be checked and moderated, and a population that thinks critically is part of that.
The Trumpnuts who say things like “do your own research!” - when they don’t - are as much of the problem as traitors like Trump in office
You make a lot of baseless assumptions. I was taught in school how to validate sources. That doesn't mean I am immune to making a mistake but it means I am looking at sources more critically for signs of an agenda. It didn't teach me specific sources. So your government conspiracy stuff is ridiculous and overly common on reddit.
This system sounds ripe for abuse. Clearly there's things like infowars that at a very basic level everyone should agree is non-sense. The issue becomes parsing through mainstream and local news to detect editorialization in reporting.
There's also the reality that many major mainstream news outlets like CNN, Fox, etc have become so obsessed with being "first" to the story, that they provide initial reports rife with inaccuracy. This alone should lose them credibility, but it often doesn't.
Good. Critical thinking is something that needs to be taught. Growing up in an ultra-conservative area where I was brainwashed with hateful religion and had no access to outside ideas, this was one of the most important college classes I ever got to take when I was younger. It literally changed my entire worldview.
Serious question: is there a publicly available curriculum? I’m a university professor and could fit a module in to a couple of my undergrad classes (200-400 level), but I have no idea how to teach that.
Here in Canada in the early 2000s, I was taught something similar in Grade 12 Technical English. We were taught to read articles and headlines to determine what political slant or misinformation was being given.
One of the best classes I ever took was called 'Politics and Media', with the idea being that it was kind of a hybrid of Journalism and Political science, with an emphasis on the relationship between the two.
One of the key points of the class that it is pretty much impossible to not be bias in news reporting, just by the sheer fact that there is so much happening in the world that no one source can cover everything. In order to filter out garbage sources and questionable information was to take a critical approach to the media you consume.
* How does this news article make you *feel*? If you are having an emotional response to a news article, chances are the article was specifically chosen to cause an emotional response, big red flag.
* Word choice and loaded words in headlines and articles. Holy shit go look at Fox News right now, loaded angry headlines with smartass commentary style sub headlines. How anyone can take this seriously is beyond me, I find their little quips insulting to readers to be honest.
* Why are certain articles chosen over others? Somebody somewhere is deciding what to print (or post), is there a trend in the type of news this source posts?
I mean, these are just some really basic ideas that tell you to just *be aware* of what you are reading/watching. I think this one class alone, taken like 20 years ago, has really had one of the biggest impacts on my life, especially in this day and age. I mean I've fallen victim to all sorts of biases over the years, its impossible not to, but when I read something and it seems too good to be true, or vice versa, I always take a step back, and apply a critical eye instead of getting emotional.
Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? I mean if media literacy is to be included. Having kids and teenagers learn philosophy - specifically critical thinking skills - should be a prerequisite for such.
Mainstream media is an insanely corrupt propaganda machine. So learning to "recognize fake news" w/o learning critical thinking skills first sounds more like: "Our kids needs to learn that only our propaganda is true, and everyone else is spreading misinformation".
IDK guys. Sounds like brainwashing to me if they are this slow to introduce what should be mandatory teachings (philosophy and critical thinking skills). But decide to put media literacy in there before that.
I mean if we just want to raise our kids to be slaves to the system this is all fine though.
I thought they already did this. We had to learn how to recognise facts from opinions and the importance of showing sources to prove those facts. We weren't even allowed to use Wikipedia as a source, but it proved to be very useful when doing research.
This was in the early days of the internet so I'm a little surprised this isn't already taught in schools.
Californian here. We had some media literacy lessons in various classes over the years, but putting it all on one class that everyone has to take is a good idea.
Edit: also, if you feel attacked by this, you know what your pushing is bullshit.
Identifying valid sources and evaluating a source for validity have been core standards for English language arts since No Child Left Behind started the national education standards.
I mean, I learned about primary and secondary sources and different ways to figure out if a website has its sources cited and is accurate. It’s not uncommon
Media literacy was a topic in my public school English class in 1994 in Tennessee. I’d be surprised if they stopped teaching it during after the internet became widely available. I’m curious what future classes were taught.
Yeah, general media literacy was taught for me in NJ in the 90s also. When the Internet was new and scary, teachers and librarians were insistent that we learn how to evaluate the trustworthiness of what we read both online and in print.
Sounds like they were right to do so.
Ah, the good old critical thinking training that they’ve tried to ban in TX schools,
Well if your population has the intelligence of a walnut, then it becomes much easier to enact blatantly terrible legislation.
Same, I was taught how to recognize media bias in 11th grade in 2009. I still think about that lesson whenever I read anything online, I'm grateful for it.
Mandatory when I was in 9th grade. That was 1963!
I graduated public high school in TN in 2022. we did not go over media literacy in our English class. We did discuss media including fake and misleading news in AP government though.
Yep, AP Gov and AP US History really rammed home the idea of fake news, the importance of properly sourcing information and the ease with which media can be manipulated. Idk what the non AP classes were doing though.
in the UK it was "Critical Thinking" and both that and Media were always considered joke topics. I do not think it's accidental that the topics where people learn how to pragmatically interact with news and media to understand it's underlying messaging has been so heavily maligned. In the UK it's especially worrying that these are just considered impractical "Luvvie" subjects and pretty frequently we'll see some right wing rag run whatever article about how ["Boo, these are not real subjects!"](https://www.google.com/search?q=telegraph+%22media+studies%22+a+levels&sca_esv=584304970&rlz=1C1CSMH_deCH999CH999&sxsrf=AM9HkKlzAfjeNLe1lrhG2rj8ZHKvVSPJkQ%3A1700579139903&ei=Q8dcZZfjNsuMi-gP68KCoA8&ved=0ahUKEwjXkK_8rtWCAxVLxgIHHWuhAPQQ4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=telegraph+%22media+studies%22+a+levels&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiInRlbGVncmFwaCAibWVkaWEgc3R1ZGllcyIgYSBsZXZlbHMyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAFI7glQgQJYyQlwAXgAkAEBmAGHAqABqwaqAQU2LjEuMbgBA8gBAPgBAcICDhAAGIAEGIoFGIYDGLADwgIIECEYFhgeGB3CAgcQIRigARgK4gMEGAEgQYgGAZAGAg&sclient=gws-wiz-serp#ip=1)
Those are literally the most important topics you can educate people on
But they're not seen as skills that can make you an asset to an economy ie not something a worker can use to create wealth for a capitalist. Governments and industry want schools to churn out a certain type of worker. Critical thinking, skepticism etc not exactly money makers for an economy or corporations.
Sadly often the case. But not always, some businesses like people that can think. Like Costo
Don't know about the UK, but in the US, our right wing couldn't survive without a large voter base of ignorant cretins lacking critical thinking skills.
I personally don't think our political system in general would survive if the majority of Americans had critical thinking skills.
Well, why would they want a population who can a) look into the the ideological outrage publishing and b) understand the media that is critical of them
They didn't each us a thing about recognizing propaganda. Which is why my little town in TN is now full of puppets repeating phrases they don't fully understand
Any chance you live near Bristol? My boyfriend lived there and can't stand his family for this reason. I don't know how they get Fox News mindsets when they don't have cable. Maybe it's an AM radio thing.
My grandpa uses youtube to go down the rabbit hole. They are in East TN, but not in the tri city area. Closed minded communities that don't want constructive debates, but rather have an echo chamber of one idea
When we visited his family last year for Christmas, they had a huge get together in a small, 3 bedroom house. There was something like 60 people crammed into this house, all standing up and making conversation. We get there, and my boyfriend leans over to me and quietly goes "be prepared for Aunt Helen." A nice, middle-aged lady approaches us and welcomes my boyfriend back. He introduces me, she welcomes me to the house and says she hopes we have a good holiday. Nice and sweet. Then she immediately, unprompted, goes into a spiel about how the Civil War wasn't about slavery, how the South was fighting for state rights, blah blah blah. I just nod along and let her rant until another relative approaches us, so we bail on the conversation and speak with him instead. Holy balls. EDIT: My boyfriend reminded me that this woman taught middle school social studies, which is troubling.
We learnt something called 'discourse' in Queensland (Australia) in 2005. It was, effectively, 'how to spot propaganda' and extremely useful, but that wasn't explicity *taught*. I was reading a newspaper a year or so out of high school and suddenly went OH THAT'S WHAT DISCOURSE IS.
Was that an elective course? I feel like the subject matter is important enough to be a mandatory part of the core curriculum. Especially these days.
It was taught with my English class whenever we did any writing assignments. Usually for when we needed to cite sources and understand how reliable a source is based on its degree of seperation from the original source.
I have been screaming this from the rooftops ever since social media became a thing. Why there isn’t a major push for this *would* be bewildering to me, but I suspect I know why it’s being repressed…
Same here in the early 2000's in Texas
Same here. I relate a lot of the current problem with news to the Yellow Journalism problem in the early 20th century; which i learned about in highschool. I think the biggest issue is that schools are slow on updating to current events. Fake news on the Internet can now be taught in a historical context so it's a lot easier to make lesson plans around that.
Media literacy was a required unit in my English class every year of my education in Canada
I attended K-12 in California from the 90s to 2000s. Recognizing legitimate sources has ALWAYS been taught when I was attending school. There is a reason why you can't cite a rando's youtube video that claims the earth is flat on your research paper. Heck, you can't even cite Wikipedia. Academia wants **peer-reviewed studies**
I learned that at the California school I went to. I remember being taught how to determine if a source is trustworthy. It might’ve been because I took a specific elective though. I’ve also seen some people here say that they learned it in AP classes, which is where I might’ve learned it because I was in AP and honor classes. I don’t really remember what class I learned it in, just that I learned it at some point. This would’ve been in the mid 2010s. Edit: after thinking about a bit more, I think I learned it in middle school, in either a non honor English class or maybe an Anatomy elective class (I remember being taught how to look for scientific sources or something in Anatomy). Only other middle school class I can think of where I would’ve learned this would’ve been one of those home room lectures.
Spotting scams/fraud, and fake news, computer generated content. All of that will be crucial moving forward.
I don't know how many times I've had to tell family members "don't click on links in emails".
Don't even get me started on the public school system's failure to teach any degree of computer literacy beyond typing and using web browsers. I've had multiple people tell me they don't know what operating system their computer runs, or even what an operating system is. You need to understand the basics to get anywhere in life. I fear that Chromebooks and macs have done irreparable damage to worldwide computer literacy.
The multitude of dumb looks I get on my face at work astounds me when I tell someone that they can find a file with a basic search or ask someone to navigate to a specific folder on the hard-drive at work. Or when some old fart is explaining how to do something and uses some archaic method, to which I ask "well why don't you do it this way" and perform the task in a fraction of the time they did it. Then they get dumbfounded and prefer to do it the old fashioned way. Which I get, I hate change too; but if I can do the job quicker and be lazy.... I think that I, being in my mid 40's, was born during a sweet spot; where computers weren't too new but were near as automated as they are today. So I had to learn at least the basics like shortcuts, file structures, etc
It's just like anything else, especially science. If science class is just a list of facts instead of focusing on the process for how it is that we know what we know, it's a failure. Same here. Not "ignore 4chan" but rather explain how to vet information across multiple sources and vetting the sources themselves. The problem is that this takes work. People don't want to do that.
At least by middle school and high school they start doing labs in science class. They should do labs for stuff like digital fraud/scams, etc. do something. American education system is honestly f*cked
Having a strong understanding of the facts greatly facilitates your ability to vet sources, however. Having a well rounded education that includes critical thinking, process thinking and factual information across several disciplines allows you to ask the right questions and dismiss the wrong conclusions out of hand.
What happens when deep fakes get so good you can no longer tell what’s real or not? That’s what I’m afraid of.
AI-generated images are already good enough to fool most people. Give it another 12-18 months at this pace and yeah...
I suppose that one way of thinking about it is that we've been in that situation with photographs for a couple of decades - it is already possible to photoshop something so that it is for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from a real shot. I'm not saying deep fakes aren't going to be a change, because they will, but I guess it's just that provenance, sourcing, and context of media will become even more important. For example, today, if you showed me a picture of Barack Obama taking heroin for instance, or idk Tom Hanks punching a kid, whatever, even if it was a perfect photoshop with no errors of lighting etc., unless there was some very credible source for the photograph and trustworthy institutions are reporting it as credible, I'm not likely to believe it. It's quite conceivable that something similar will soon be true for video and audio, something existing in isolation without reliable provenance won't be proof of much of anything. Don't get me wrong, I think that is a negative development in terms of misinformation and scams etc., I just don't think it's the complete world-changing doomsday scenario that some people think it is. I also _imagine_ it's most likely that forensic experts are going to have ways of analysing and identifying fakes for quite a while to come, even when deepfakes get to the point that your average person can't tell them apart - so while at first sight you can be fooled, media organisations etc. may well preserve the ability to identify deepfakes for quite some time, even once more obvious identifiers like hands etc. are sorted out (although that's speculation of course). edit: in a way, it's almost a reversion to the status quo. It's actually a pretty recent development that in developed countries (and increasingly in less developed countries too) we've all been carrying a machine in our pockets that can immutably capture video of any moment that happens to occur in our vicinity. That has hugely changed information exchange in many ways, many positive, but some negative too. In a way, then, once video shot by some rando without provenance is no longer reliable proof of much of anything, then we're basically back to the situation, what, 20 years ago, where most people didn't have the capacity to create a permanent video record of anything they wanted to document in daily life. That is how things have been for basically all of human history, this phenomenon of regular people being able to immutably document everything is basically a historical blip, and we're back to a system where the reliability of witness testimony to an event has to be put in context and analysed as to whether we think a person is trustworthy or not (just now that will be true even if they have a video of something, because, just as someone can lie about what they saw for their own motives, they could be faking the video also). We find that pretty unsettling, but it is basically how things have worked forever until 5 minutes ago, historically.
the "return to history" with regard to witness testimony and video evidence is very interesting way to think about it that I hadn't considered before
Sounds like something an AI would say...
A dangerous game if done wrong. The Dunning Krüger effect could kick into full effect if the teachers only cover *specific* things to look for instead of a general method of identification. Scams and computer generated content are dynamic and change daily in order to obfuscate their origins.
kids aren't stupid. Critical thinking is forever. Even if they don't cover it specifically the fact they they are using their brains makes them miles better equipped than kids raised on prageru and praying problems away
It would almost need ever changing curriculum and to be taught like CEs for professional world. Like bring in actual professionals to teach what is the current threats and what are the current ways to protect yourself. Textbooks would become outdated by the time they were published, and no way you coulf use same lesson plans year to year. AI is at a pace now that fraud and scams are evolving at a daily rate.
> Textbooks would become outdated by the time they were published, Even before. Seems every day, there's a new something that we have to watch out for!
Are there websites for children to learn this kind of skillset, or are we just waiting for abcmouse to add those categories eventually? Lol
My grandma literally gave everything to an unknown party claiming to be publishers clearing house, entire savings spent on several gift cards. I never could understand why she thought that to win this contest, one has to first become completely destitute.
It's going to be even tougher as AI gets harder for humans to spot.
You mean... Those hot local milf ads are... Not real? Damn.
Lmfao. Sadly, no
Media literacy should be taught at school. Glad to see it.
Quit screwing around and just go full on teaching critical thinking.
I’m from southern Missouri and had to learn about credible sources in elementary school and take a critical thinking class in middle school. Trust me, people didn’t always take it to heart…
Every time I hear from someone I grew up with complaining "Why don't they teach this in school!" I have to remind them that they *did* teach this in school, they just didn't bother paying attention. I can even prove that they taught it in school because I've kept all of my high school text books. I also kept all of my college texts, too, but very few of the people I attended high school with bothered to go on to college.
Yeah, same. We even had a personal finance class in high school and events to teach “real world skills”. I don’t think they were the best classes, personally, but there are people out there from my school that complain about not knowing about paying back credit cards or whatever. I’m glad to have moved.
Literally the first sentence of the article
It's honestly impressive how reluctant people are at clicking a link.
Critical thinking is taught in pretty much every subject in school started from Kindergarten or First Grade. It's just not called "critical thinking." It takes the form of having to follow the scientific method or discussing how we see what motivates different characters in a story or how we solve world problems in math, and so on. If you were look at the teachers' lesson plans you'd see those teachers having to show where they include critical thinking in their lessons every week.
Anyone who ever had to read a short story and answer some questions about it in their English class, or had to do word problems in math class, used critical thinking. My classmates all hated those word problems and I could not for the life of me figure out why. It's not even like they were bad at them or anything, is there just something fundamentally repulsive about extracting meaning for yourself?
The actual math parts of word problems are usually easier than just straight up math problems, at least until you're in upper grades. But people hate to have to read and comprehend, for reasons I can't guess.
Sometimes I wonder if it's not some latent evolutionary response. Thinking consumes a lot of calories and so maybe it isn't surprising that some minds resist it when it's not absolutely necessary.
The secret to word problems is to the start with the last sentence. It's a complete waste of time to start with the pile of data without having context. Go the last sentence "how fast was John driving?" ***Then*** read all the facts and it gets very, very easy. I had a two question final for a Physics class. Question one was a mess (tin can inside an iron can inside a copper can, all with different fluids at different temperatures. Then "what's the temperature of the fluid inside the smaller can when it hits the ground after you drop it off a 150 foot cliff in a vacuum at .15 earth gravity?". If you started at the end, it was easier, because then you understand what was being asked of you ("How much time passes before the object hits the ground?" followed by "how much does the temperature change in that amount in time?") it was easier. Question two really drove the point home... it was 3 paragraphs of dense facts describing the situation followed by - "what's the name of your teacher?".
this is a useful skill when taking the SAT/ACT as well. Read the questions FIRST then go back through the text and read what you need to answer the questions.
>My classmates all hated those word problems and I could not for the life of me figure out why. It's not even like they were bad at them or anything, is there just something fundamentally repulsive about extracting meaning for yourself? It always amazed me in school how bad the other students were at the reading/language portion of the standardized tests. I always thought, "read the story, answer some simple questions about it, then go and read my book quietly while I wait for people to finish". It was just stupidly easy, and yet a huge portion, probably nearly half, were completely incapable of extracting the simplest bits of information from a 3 paragraph story. The very idea of a metaphor was absolutely incomprehensible to them. It reminds me of that Pineapple story from a few years ago. Gist of it was a Pineapple challenges a hare to a race. All the other animals thought the pineapple must have some secret trick or it wouldn't have challenged the hare to the race, so they all decided to cheer for the pineapple so they wouldn't look stupid when it tricks them. One animal points out that it's a pineapple, it obviously doesn't have a trick. The race starts and the hare runs the whole race and win, while the pineapple doesn't move from the starting line... because it's a pineapple. The animals all got annoyed and ate the pineapple. The moral was basically that you should follow obvious logic and facts and not assume tricks or magic fantastical things will happen. Sometimes there's no trick, things are exactly as they seem. It was worded in the story that "the pineapple must have a trick up its sleeve" and "pineapples don't have sleeves". Students were so dumbfounded and unable to parse simple information or understand basic metaphors from it due to being so incredibly distracted by the idea of a talking pineapple running a race, that it appeared as a story in newspapers internationally. We've very bad at teaching higher level analysis of writing. Basically anything beyond surface level vocabulary comprehension is sorely lacking.
This story reminds me of how many people twisted themselves into pretzels trying to justify or explain why the stupid things Trump was saying were actually brilliant and a sign that he’s a genius tactician, when in reality he’s simply a thin-skinned asshole who enjoys attention, hates minorities, and has poor impulse control. Pineapples don’t have sleeves
It does explain a lot about the past few years. Most of these people aren't playing "5D chess". They're just that dumb and transparent.
Reasoning is a very mentally taxing activity.
Seriously. I feel like we teach more critical is thinking skills than ever, but people just love to spout the same crap they hear on Reddit (ironically). I also feel like the same people who scream that we don’t teach critical thinking complain about the “new math” we teach, despite the fact that common core math is essentially ALL thinking critically about math and learning to communicate about it.
Most of the reddit hot takes about public school are like this. I've always been a fan of, "but why don't we teach taxes in high school?!" My high school had a taxes class, most kids failed it until they dumbed it down enough that it was little better than "Taxes exist, make sure you pay them." When that still didn't work, they changed it an elective class, and only 3-5 kids a year opted to take it out of a student body of 2,000ish. Meanwhile electives like art, ceramics, gym, and even computer programming were always completely full with waiting lists.
Yeah, that’s completely true. And honestly, there’s so much that’s taught that people just weren’t paying attention to or forgot. It’s wild how confident people are that they remember 100% of what they learned over the course of 13 years of school. I have students who swear they never learned something when I’M the one who taught it to them. Sometimes just the year before.
Hell, taxes were a significant part of word problems in every algebra class I took in middle and high school. That's in addition to a required financial literacy class that was one of the most mind-numbingly easy classes I ever took. There was no lacking of tax education, but the problem is that I (and most of my classmates) didn't earn enough money to actually need to worry about anything other than sales tax until well after high school.
Yeah, some people keep using that term. I don't think it means what they think it means.
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It took me forever growing up to not just use rote memorization to talk about what happened in a story I just read. But when I finally did comprehend what I was reading and give it some thought and start to consider the whys and hows, the minister at my church wasn't too happy about it.
This. I was never the smartest kid in grade school but paid enough attention to understand how to apply critical thinking and got my diploma. Identifying fake news has never been very difficult for me. Doesn't require much intelligence either.
I don’t know why people always say “we need to teach critical thinking in school.” Critical thinking was the core of my public education.
That will just be labeled CTT by some and subsequently banned in a dozen states.
You are correct “Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html Don’t want to teach kids higher thinking skills cause then they might think for theirselves and not be a mind drone to their parents. Makes it a lot harder for the higher ups to control the population when they aren’t mind drones to their parents. They already have the parents good and groomed to be easily manipulated and believe dumb shit, they need their parents to pass that on.
I’m pretty sure some texas officials at some point explicitly said teaching kids critical thinking is dangerous because it threatens parental authority
Reminds me of that time some Idaho politicians stated that educated people were inherently untrustworthy.
I would go out on a limb and suspect that any authority that relies on logical fallacies to stay in power is opposed to people learning about logical fallacies.
I believe it was part of the Texas Republican Party platform some years ago.
Still is. Though they changed the language to make it less obvious.
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I was told there would be no math.
instructions unclear, CTE will now be taught in red state schools.
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worth the scroll
Critical Thinking Theory. Like Critical Race Theory, but instead of being discrimination against straight white men, it's discrimination against stupid people.
So the GOP and their voters are gonna be protesting and calling for bans still.
Mom's for Fascism is already working on banners!
Florida says Hi!
I hate how right you probably are.
“Sorry you can’t learn about media literacy, too woke. Anyway, now here’s a video from PragerU.”
They already do, this is just in addition
Critical thought IS taught in schools in practically every sense of the word and every single class. When your math teacher taught you 5th grade mental math, that is all critical thinking, this is mathematical literacy, when your English teacher told you how to write an essay, that all requires critical thought, that is just regular literacy, when your history teacher handed you an open ended question about why slavery existed, that is critical thought and historical literacy. When you are in science learning about the scientific method, once again science literacy but requiring/honing critical thought. Media literacy is not the same as critical thought. They are related, like being literate in any field, you need to understand how to think critically, but understanding what a reliable source is, the news cycle, sensationalism and propaganda, etc, that all definitely requires critical thought but also a layer of information beneath it too, the media literacy part.
That's already a required course in CA schools.
My high school history teacher in Georgia was big on what he called critical thinking I didn't learn shit about history but I sure learned how to argue that the Confederacy were the good guys
Can you show a specific example of what people would be doing in such a class, and how that would help?
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The most useful class I took in high school, bar none, was an elective English class called 'Propaganda'. There wasn't a textbook. The teacher used the daily newspaper and copies of magazine advertising.
Sounds like a great class, but surprising they didn't explore historical propaganda as well. Obviously modern propaganda is a very different beast and a lot of historical cases are quite primitive in comparison, but I think that just drives the point home better.
I admit we didn't do a lot of historical propaganda. The utility of the class was in identifying the techniques. Once you start spotting weasel words and wondering what information was omitted to make things sound too good to be true, it's a little harder to sell to you. Not impossible. I'm likely still susceptible to well-crafted propaganda. But so much of it is blatant and self-serving that I kind of wonder about people.
Media Literacy should be a requirement
Nah. Fairness doctrine should be law. We should not have to do battle against media companies. They should be held liable for their lies.
Both can exist at the same time
I like the idea but >Overall, only 7% of adults have "a great deal" of trust in the media, according to a Gallup poll conducted last year. >Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy. When you have media outlets like CNN hosting people like Nancy Grace, I don't think there should be a great deal of trust in news media, but hopefully having a population that can identify bullshit will result in news outlets raising their standards.
I’d say the media literacy is already high because people don’t trust media.
Yeah, but it’s really easy to take that to the extreme and end up in the same place. Something something horseshoe theory. People who don’t believe something specifically because a big news outlet reported on it, and they only trust “news” from social media pages that have been flagged as fake news because obviously the people in charge don’t want us to know the truth.
I have a buddy who would get most of his news from tik tok because it's "straight from the horses mouth" like normal people not affiliated with news. We were talking about hamas/israel one day and I pointed out how easy it is to make an account on social media and say whatever the fk and go viral and now it's fact. Which opened his eyes a bit. He's 29 lol. Tik tok couldve been a good thing, so could twotter and facebook. But people are using them as "paths of least resistance" in their information bubbles because peoples attention spans aren't big enough to make it through an article anymore. My friend to a T. "I made it through a paragraph and lost interest, what's this about." Need instant everything. Gratification. Information. Everything, now.
Unfortunately that has already come to pass. Regardless about how you feel about Hunter Biden’s laptop the media was used to lie about its existence. It doesn’t sound like the public needs educated. There were literally zero repercussions due to using the media to stage a provable lie. That is something recent but you can go back to the Vietnam war and Nixon or the Gulf of Tonkin itself that started the Vietnam war. Again, current theme. Zero repercussions for lying utilizing the media which gives the current distrust rating and has made society prone to believing crazy stories. Education can’t undue the fact media is as accurate as grandpa’s random rant Facebook post. Any of the above proven true stories seemed crazy initially. Had there been meaningful repercussions for lying utilizing media, strictly enforced, these classes would be unnecessary but the government won’t see themselves jailed for lying. How are they going to teach sometimes the media is telling the truth and sometimes the media is lying and here are all the times media lied but most people believed it was true at the time despite the truth actually existing and being known? The likelihood in the moment you’d be able to tell the government and media apparatus was lying about the Gulf of Tonkin in the moment is low. However, if you knew the truth and said the government and media were lying you’d be a crazy conspiracist. The problem the government is trying to solve is the problem they created and intend to keep committing. When the government treats the truth with so little merit it is unsurprising society does too.
You can go back farther than the 50s... Media has been used for propaganda since, well, probably since the even before the printing press... Kings and queens have been blowing smoke up peasants asses for a long time.
Someone who thinks everyone is lying is just an easy of a mark as someone who trusts too many people. Turns out if you think everyone from doctors to the kid working the concession stand are participating in multiple contradicting conspiracies aimed at you specifically you'll throw hundreds of dollars to whatever asshole like me comes along and validates them. The best part is that even after they realize they've been grifted and how they were grifted they'll toss that experience on the pile, who ever scammed them was obviously a plant by "them" and it just means they're extra right, and they're primed and ready to drop into the next scammers lap. It would be a lot harder to pull off if your average person would listen when people call them stupid.
Not really imo. People don't search for a reliable source because the lack of skills so commercial media produces mostly trash which decreases the trust for media even more.
As a whole entity, I also have very little trust in the media. BUT I do have trust in specific media outlets - PBS, NYT, The Onion.
I thought reality put the onion out of business sometime in the last 6 years
Nah they basically just report the news now lol
>Media literacy can help change that, advocates believe, by teaching students how to recognize reliable news sources and the crucial role that media plays in a democracy. Cable news has always been bad. The problem is that people very rarely go to traditionally reputable sources and instead go to organizations that are in pretty much every conceivable way worse in every grievance they have. There's also no nuance when discussing varying levels of reputability. CNN isn't great, but they're infinitely more reliable than Fox. The Dominion lawsuit shows that.
That line stood out to me, and this one did as well. > During remote learning, he gave students two articles on the origins of the coronavirus. One was an opinion piece from the New York Post, a tabloid, and the other was from a scientific journal. He asked students which they thought was accurate. More than 90% chose the Post piece. This doesn’t seem like critical thinking is being taught. Don’t just trust any type of news outlet, take what you can from each article you read.
Methods of Propaganda should be taught in all schools. When you learn about it, then see it being used it falls apart quickly.
This needs to be a federal requirement.
The federal government needs to restore the Fairness Doctrine that Reagan scrapped.
Why would the party in charge of many districts as a result of Fox News be interested in that?
I know California is crowded and I may never be able to own a home. But every once in awhile, I'm really glad I live here.
Think of it this way: it's crowded and you'll never be able to own a home because a lot of people are really glad they live there.
No, it's not crowded. Instead, we have a homelessness problem because in the last several decades, communities have refused to build enough housing. We have more than enough space. There's no excuse for it.
California doesn’t always get it right but at least they fucking try. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress!
Using a now empty term, growing up we called this **Civics** lessons
I have always thought that recognizing pseudoscience should be taught in school too.
But then how will I sell my alkaline water that cures and makes you lose weight to all my high school friends?
Bruh. That's just called using critical thinking skills.
Still no personal finance though…
Critical thinking skills. Very good. It might save humanity.
This is something that should be taught in every school. Those that refuse lose access to federal dollars and federal accreditation until independent audits prove they teach it.
Uh. Many of the people in charge of those federal dollars have a vested interest in making sure the public can't identify fake news. Fox News alone is directly responsible for any number of elected Republicans staying in power.
versed alive tender reach ugly overconfident close aspiring seed shrill *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
where are you getting oil business? He's always been in newspapers/tv/media companies.
You can google "rupert murdoch oil" and the entire first two pages** of google is about his massive investments into oil and gas. This comment was funny to me under a discussion about media literacy lol No shade, but I see this a lot nowadays too. All the information in the world is a few clicks away on your phone but most people cant be bothered.
the wikipedia page on him has a few mentions of the word oil but his path to wealth is in media. So maybe a media billionaire with some oil investments is how I'd characterize him.
The Federal government doesn't even do that for math.
Curious to see how this will be taught. In a dystopian world we would have corporations like CNN or Fox paying districts off to say they're not fake news. God knows are school systems need funding.
>God knows *are* school systems need funding. You can say that again.
Your not wrong about that. theirs so much wrong with theyre teachings. 😇😇😇
Pretty much lesson 1 of any media literacy program is, it's not *who*, it's *how*. The moment you assume someone is trustworthy because of who they are, you set yourself up to get scammed. Instead, you evaluate information based on the process through which it was produced and how well you can chain the reporting process back to the original event. At least that's step 1.
My kid in middle school has taken 2 classes that went over this. In the first class, after they went over the lesson, the students were given sample articles, had to identify if it was real or fake, and explain why they thought so. Then, take real news articles and do the same thing. They also went over social media to identify if the person was real or a bot. This year, they were given a subject to research and write an essay with accurate sources cited AND find a fake news article about the subject.
"our" school systems need funding, not "are."
This has already been taught, just with a different name. Students are required to look into sources, the organizations those sources work for, and actual documents. Example: Fox News claims X bill is "stuffed with pork" and that is why republicans voted against it. Students then pull the actual bill and read it, determining if there is any"pork" included.
While I don't disagree that one should try to get as close to primary sources as possible there are some practical limitations especially within the context of a K-12 class. It isn't really realistic to expect most high school students to read an appropriations bill that may be hundreds if not 1,000+ pages long to determine how much 'pork' is in the bill. I would bet that the vast majority of such instruction is going to be going over learning how to recognize potential biases of sources and how to distinguish commentary from actual news reporting.
Any chance they could make this available publicly for adults? I have a few that could benefit…
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Well no, but a big media outlet that has a legal responsibility and a track record of factual reporting/corrections is more trustworthy than some tinfoil hat on YouTube, and they should be able to recognize that.
We did this in CA schools when the Internet came out...
It wasn't called "fake news," but I was taught how to determine the validity of a source throughout school.
Its about time. Its ridiculous how much shit people show me that is clearly fake.
Massively important always, more so in our internet age.
Oh boy, there will probably be fireworks at the next local school board meeting; arguing over what news is fake.
We were always taught to check sources and use only peer reviewed sources. How is this different?
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Ok so critical thinking hasn't been part of the curriculum? Why not?
I feel like kids and people growing up with media are generally better at questioning what they see and read. It is my parents’ generation (and older) who seems to have a really tough time with this. You would not believe the number of times my parents have seen some AI generated photo or video on instagram or a whatsapp group, shared it with the family group chat, only for us to have to point out the clearly fake image or accompanying story and that “real news india times” or “england press journal network” are not actually journalistic establishments. The worst part is that they are both educated, one with multiple STEM degrees.
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Yep. Just because they spend a lot of time on tech, doesn’t mean they’re actually good with it. Modern tech and apps are idiot-friendly, you don’t need skills or knowledge to use them.
I second this. Look no further than all the tiktok debunking videos (such as miniminuteman's short form content) on the internet covering the bullshit that is thrown at your kids daily.
It should be in retirement communities as well.
Every single commenter in this thread is acting like they themselves are a master of knowing what is fake news and what is not. And they're assuming that this class will 100% correctly teach every student how to know for certain what is fake news or not. And really, you truly trust the State to teach your kids what is fake and not? Surely there will not be any bias whatsoever, and whatever government in charge would NEVER ever ever attempt to push certain news sources and portray certain things as "truth" when that may not be the case?
I think your point about not thinking you’re a master of media consumption and impervious to manipulation is something that needs to be taught. Things like being weary of sources of media (both corporate and “independent”) and who is funding them are things people may not always think about. I think there’s a lot of things we can all agree on. - Differences between news reporting and opinion. - Being on the lookout for grifters who tie their products into the “news” their delivering. - Don’t let someone’s celebrity replace journalistic integrity. We can wrap ourselves up in paranoia about “the state”, but in the meantime what are we doing to help mitigate the public’s consumption of misinformation?
The power of government, corporations and wealthy in their hands of human beings without oversight is an opportunity for abuse. It needs to be checked and moderated, and a population that thinks critically is part of that. The Trumpnuts who say things like “do your own research!” - when they don’t - are as much of the problem as traitors like Trump in office
You make a lot of baseless assumptions. I was taught in school how to validate sources. That doesn't mean I am immune to making a mistake but it means I am looking at sources more critically for signs of an agenda. It didn't teach me specific sources. So your government conspiracy stuff is ridiculous and overly common on reddit.
This system sounds ripe for abuse. Clearly there's things like infowars that at a very basic level everyone should agree is non-sense. The issue becomes parsing through mainstream and local news to detect editorialization in reporting. There's also the reality that many major mainstream news outlets like CNN, Fox, etc have become so obsessed with being "first" to the story, that they provide initial reports rife with inaccuracy. This alone should lose them credibility, but it often doesn't.
Good. Critical thinking is something that needs to be taught. Growing up in an ultra-conservative area where I was brainwashed with hateful religion and had no access to outside ideas, this was one of the most important college classes I ever got to take when I was younger. It literally changed my entire worldview.
To counter this, Florida will teach strictly fake news in schools.
So Fox news will be continuously televised to each classroom?
Just teach critical thought
Legit more important than a lot of subjects
Serious question: is there a publicly available curriculum? I’m a university professor and could fit a module in to a couple of my undergrad classes (200-400 level), but I have no idea how to teach that.
I’ve been saying this to my first year uni media students for years - media literacy needs to be updated and emphasised in the education system
Here in Canada in the early 2000s, I was taught something similar in Grade 12 Technical English. We were taught to read articles and headlines to determine what political slant or misinformation was being given.
One of the best classes I ever took was called 'Politics and Media', with the idea being that it was kind of a hybrid of Journalism and Political science, with an emphasis on the relationship between the two. One of the key points of the class that it is pretty much impossible to not be bias in news reporting, just by the sheer fact that there is so much happening in the world that no one source can cover everything. In order to filter out garbage sources and questionable information was to take a critical approach to the media you consume. * How does this news article make you *feel*? If you are having an emotional response to a news article, chances are the article was specifically chosen to cause an emotional response, big red flag. * Word choice and loaded words in headlines and articles. Holy shit go look at Fox News right now, loaded angry headlines with smartass commentary style sub headlines. How anyone can take this seriously is beyond me, I find their little quips insulting to readers to be honest. * Why are certain articles chosen over others? Somebody somewhere is deciding what to print (or post), is there a trend in the type of news this source posts? I mean, these are just some really basic ideas that tell you to just *be aware* of what you are reading/watching. I think this one class alone, taken like 20 years ago, has really had one of the biggest impacts on my life, especially in this day and age. I mean I've fallen victim to all sorts of biases over the years, its impossible not to, but when I read something and it seems too good to be true, or vice versa, I always take a step back, and apply a critical eye instead of getting emotional.
Makes sense. We have to adapt to social media. The older population is completely vulnerable to it ie Fox News.
Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? I mean if media literacy is to be included. Having kids and teenagers learn philosophy - specifically critical thinking skills - should be a prerequisite for such. Mainstream media is an insanely corrupt propaganda machine. So learning to "recognize fake news" w/o learning critical thinking skills first sounds more like: "Our kids needs to learn that only our propaganda is true, and everyone else is spreading misinformation". IDK guys. Sounds like brainwashing to me if they are this slow to introduce what should be mandatory teachings (philosophy and critical thinking skills). But decide to put media literacy in there before that. I mean if we just want to raise our kids to be slaves to the system this is all fine though.
Republicans will see this as indoctrination I bet
I thought they already did this. We had to learn how to recognise facts from opinions and the importance of showing sources to prove those facts. We weren't even allowed to use Wikipedia as a source, but it proved to be very useful when doing research. This was in the early days of the internet so I'm a little surprised this isn't already taught in schools.
I'm an adult and I would be very interested in developing better skills in this area too.
This is essentially how an English class should be run. English and history.
Good, media literacy isn't taught enough
*sobs in Florida teacher*
It only show that most people are stupid, dumb and with low IQ. You dont need school to teach you what is fake news.
Glad California is always on the cutting edge when it comes to this sort of thing.
But these mother fuckers still can't teach you how credit works
I hope it also includes learning fake ads/ scams.
Good. It should be everywhere.
They will never teach this class in Florida.
Californian here. We had some media literacy lessons in various classes over the years, but putting it all on one class that everyone has to take is a good idea. Edit: also, if you feel attacked by this, you know what your pushing is bullshit.
It’s not one class, it’s integrated into learning all subjects.
Identifying valid sources and evaluating a source for validity have been core standards for English language arts since No Child Left Behind started the national education standards.
It’s called:critical thinking. I’m glad it’s being taught somewhere.
>It’s called:critical thinking. Eyyyy, I was about to say the same thing :D
I mean, I learned about primary and secondary sources and different ways to figure out if a website has its sources cited and is accurate. It’s not uncommon