It's always surprising to me to see tech folks disparage humanities studies, then seem flabbergasted at how to fight problems like disinformation/misinformation. IMO, studying language, literature, and criticism are critical skills for operating in a culture that is flooded with information.
In terms of what we can do right now... I've been following Mike Caulfield on Twitter (@holden) and he is doing some interesting work on developing mental tools that school kids can use to evaluate the information that comes to them in social feeds.
I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards. It is documented that textbook manufacturers publish different history and science texts based on the region of the country regarding the civil war or evolution.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
I also think critical thinking is VERY hard. Harder than people imagine. It is hard to teach, hard to deploy, hard to practice. I'm not sure even 20% of the population could muster the brain power required to sift through today's onslaught of zone-flooding garbage.
I now think the problem with this is a lack of standards.
That's fair, it's certainly one of many hurdles that this sort of a solution would have to face.
Not to be a nihilist, but what makes you think underfunded schools that struggle to teach basic reading will teach media literacy and criticism with any success? and will be supported by publishers that feel the same way?
Well I'd probably answer that by starting out with an inquiry on how nihilism is a factor in what is a completely valid question about implementation? A school's ability to fund this kind of program from textbooks to technology to training staff and instructors has to be considered, this type of educational program doesn't happen in vacuum.
So I'd say you're right to ask questions about the disparity in school funding and how it would affect a media literacy curriculum-even if I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary. But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
To the questions of publishers, excellent question again. Maybe there are some models already out there worth exploring and iterating upon to maximize the value across the various school systems and school models (public, montessori, et al), a few people have commented that there are comparable programs where they live, I'd be curious to see if there are systems worth replicating in this thought experiment.
I think you raise excellent points here, all things said.
Funding is a red herring, it's not primarily about money. The whole framework of school is not geared towards this, because there is just not enough teachers who have the capability to teach something like this. They themselves aren't the brightest minds. Now, higher salaries could in principle make teaching jobs more attractive to the best minds, but it would require a huge social change, not just shuffling the budget around a little bit.
And from the children's side: It's already extremely hard to teach kids anything at a deeper level, especially those ones who will later on become susceptible to misinformation. If I look at my Facebook feed, schoolmates who got bad grades around age 10 are the ones sharing fake quiz results, horoscope stuff, "you won't believe what THIS person..." articles, listicles, racist stuff etc. Sure it's just correlational, but I think we don't have much better ways than we currently do in school.
If we could go back in time and design some critical thinking curriculum, are you sure you could teach something useful to those struggling 10-year-olds, that would keep their adult selves away from Internet bullshit?
If we could go back in time and design some critical thinking curriculum, are you sure you could teach something useful to those struggling 10-year-olds, that would keep their adult selves away from Internet bullshit?
Yes. That's why I made the suggestion to begin this thread with. What those 10-year-olds who grow-up to become adults (as we all do) do with that information is impossible to ever truly know, but I think something of value could be taught, yes, absolutely.
But I disagree that funding is a red-herring, no it's not solely about the money, but as I said: curriculum implementation does not happen in a vacuum. It's relevant, and I don't see many useful discussions about implementation specifically happening without it. If there's a discussion to be had about the ethics or merits of media literacy, sure money probably doesn't carry as much weight--but I'm trying to speak as broadly as possible on the topic to avoid the trappings of turtles-all-the-way-down kvetching about the stylistics over how the discussion is framed.
It would be interesting to see such a curriculum in the concrete, perhaps some country has something like that.
For example, we had something approximating it in Hungary, in history class. The very fist history lesson we had, was on historical sources, how historians work, "who benefits?", how you can know that a coin saying "minted in 350 BC" must be fake etc. And then later it was all facts and gospel, no critical presentation of different possibilities and interpretations and framings. Because it would be overwhelming.
But to actually train critical thinking, all classes should be redesigned in this manner, encouraging kids to poke holes in the material, but teachers can barely venture out of the confines of the curriculum. An elementary school physics teacher won't be able to explain things to you the same way a professor could if you raise some criticism or find a plothole in the simplified lie-to-children presentation. They'll just say, "that's how it is, memorize it".
It's a very difficult problem and hardly scalable.
Someone suggested below that it was working in their countries, but the comment got flag-killed not long after it was posted. If that person is still following the thread hopefully they'd be willing to share their experiences on it and what the success metrics look like.
That said...
Reading other more recent comments though I think we're drifting a bit here and introducing some creep into my initial suggestion: critical thinking and media literacy certainly have some overlap in the types of class and even perhaps overlap in topic, but I'm unsure if I'd necessarily agree that 'media literacy' as a school topic needs to go all the way down the rabbit hole of of unpacking "critical theory" and "how to think critically" just to hold courses on what I initially and deliberately called 'media literacy and criticism'.
Your points are nonetheless well met, however-it definitely is a difficult nut to crack, and I can't help but wonder if it's a type of thing where if the immediate benefits maybe don't come from solving the problem but manifest as external results from simply looking at existing similar curricula and going from there-to maybe lower the initial hurdles of implementation that you and others spoke of? What do you think?
What are example topics of media literacy that you would cover? How to check the URL bar? How to look for institutional affiliations in an article? Give them a whitelist of publications they can trust? Warn them to look out for bad spelling (what if they themselves cannot spell well?)?
Perhaps tell them a story and ask them to rewrite it such that the bad guy comes out looking like the good guy and vice versa, or similar manipulations and framing exercises. To pick out manipulative phrases from presidential speeches, like peace, democracy, our great nation etc. But that would directly conflict with what they hear in other classes. Or perhaps use the example of dictatorial propaganda, text and posters alike, point out manipulative stuff.
Perhaps one interesting thing would be to peek behind the curtains. To tell them how news are made, how books are produced, how science works, what is peer review, how they can look up the original primary source (but this is too advanced for kids...). That books and knowledge and articles don't just fall out of the sky, they are deliberately produced with goals in mind.
I fear that ultimately it would devolve into a "don't believe everything you read, kids!", similar to "don't do drugs" lectures.
* How to source and read cited sources of online publications
* Copyright, fair use, associated topics (memes would be a great way to capture the attention of a middle schooler and would be a perfect tangent to these topics)
* Print and online advertising, how print markets have changed and evolved with the new digital landscape and the influence advertising and money has on content production (Youtuber's and patreons, again, a topic relevant to a young captive mind and one they're familiar with)
There's genuinely NO shortage of boilerplate contemporary lesson plans all across the internet covering "media literacy" as an applied subject matter for young minds-such that I don't really believe this to be as difficult of a teachable subject as many people commenting here are trying to make it out as being[0]
> I'm not sure it's particularly accurate to describe such questions as "nihilist", they're completely necessary.
Yeah. 'Nihilist' wasn't the correct word. Perhaps fallacious was more accurate: I think the subtext of my Q was, "If you can't fix everything why even start?" Which is dangerous.
I think I was fishing for answers: how is critical thinking even taught? My only experience with school was my one pass through it. And I didn't start critically thinking until my late 20's during the Clinton administration. I remember taking a critical thinking class in college (engineering school) and just sitting there as a freshman with my mouth hanging open when called on to make a critique.
It took a degree of engagement for me to become critical about issues. But then I was one-sided, and it took literally 20 more years before I started realizing there are two sides to an argument.
Not to toot my own horn, but I was very smart and very unobjective about anything outside of tech for 4/5ths of my life.
> But by no means am I intending to make any sort of value judgement about how successful this school or that school will be by merely suggesting taking a stab at introducing media literacy into public schooling.
I don't know how many other HN'ers have the same question, but I'd really like to know: how would a teacher proceed to instill what took me 40+ years to learn (and still learning!) into a teen-aged brain?
To properly think critically you'd have to even question what school teaches you. The framework of school as an institution, it's purposes, it's origins. If you're lucky, your parents teach you how the real world relates to school, how teachers are just normal people, and aren't experts, that schools are operated under a certain ideological agenda, either governmental or from the owners of the private institution. That even experts aren't truth-oracles and have disagreements. That in complicated questions, like history, different countries may teach very different stories in school. And that your school's version is also not unbiased.
I don't see how you can teach the essence of critical thinking when it's in itself a fiercely individualistic don't-just-trust-the-authority idea.
If you teach it as such, you will get people to believe in any and all crackpottery because "I learned not to trust school and experts, I now found the actual truth that my school has repressed in this creationist UFO book on how aliens built the pyramids".
The other option is to teach them not to trust anything that comes from "unapproved" sources, only believe your government institutions, UN orgs etc. This may seem like a good baseline for the average person but it's just appeal to authority and not critical thinking.
I think there is just no such thing as "critical thinking" that could be taught as such, in itself. You have to go to the object level. If you want to dispel creationism, you have to teach biology and talk about how we know what we know about evolution and make sure people deeply understand it in their bones and they don't just regurgitate what they think you expect of them. It's the same in every subject. If you want people not to believe in magic healing crystal energy vibrations and parapsychology and homeopathy, you have to get them to understand some principles of real medicine and real physics (with equations and exercises all that). Only someone who has firm foundations on the object level, can successfully apply critical thinking.
One thing that could be taught though is propaganda techniques, marketing psychology, how it relates to the brain's reward systems, how ads are designed and monitored, A/B testing and tracking in cell phones, addiction. How cults form, the human biases that cult leaders use, a lot of stuff about human behavior, social psychology, trust, different personality types. Fallacies, pitfalls of thinking. But all these are very meta and again, to have a good grasp of these, you need a good actual base on the object level.
Most of actual critical thinking in the real world looks like "wait a minute, that doesn't feel right according to my model of how the world works". It's not really by matching things against a shortlist of logical fallacies that you had to memorize for some test.
To add to this: you have to rely on authorities in a sense. I trust that Einstein's theory of General Relativity is true because I trust in the scientific consensus. I trust that the claims made by climate scientists are true because I trust in the peer review process. Now, of course, all of these people can be wrong. But I, as an individual, only have a limited number of years to live and I cannot verify every single of piece of information for myself. Ergo, I have to decide to trust certain authorities, at least partially if I want to do anything useful with my life.
That's true. But you also actually have to learn at least some things that came out of the same official sources and make sure that they do make sense.
That's why I'm saying that the object level is important. Teaching meta is way more difficult.
Also, as I wrote somewhere else, if I look at my Facebook feed for posts of former schoolmates, the ones who had good grades at the time and ended up in higher ed, learning about the world, they don't post fake news and clickbait and horoscopes and don't allow random apps to post in their name etc., while those who used to be struggling and couldn't learn English (as a foreign language) well etc. they do post junk.
Now there are always exceptions, like the university educated engineer who turns to build a perpetuum mobile and cries conspiracy for "getting silenced" etc. But by and large what it comes down to is having a large body of knowledge and understanding about the world. It's not particularly that their "critical thinking" skills are better. They have just read more, learned more, can use foreign language sources, generally have a better model of how the (natural and social) world works, condensed to "intuition". Simply dropping in a "critical thinking" course for kids won't make a significant effect I fear.
1,000 times yes! In elementary and middle school, I had weekly learning from our school librarian on seeking the truth through a consensus of multiple sources. She taught us how to properly use Wikipedia as a source for finding other sources.
I have been wondering how one would teach enough evolutionary psychology and neuroscience to children to make them less susceptible to memetic engineering. Now that we have gone from human marketers to automated systems working to influence purchases and votes, traditional media criticism seems insufficient.
That’s an interesting question, though I suppose my response would be media literacy and criticism doesn’t have to necessarily imply traditional media in a singular breadth. In suggesting media literacy it was encompassing a spectrum.
I'm definitely not suggesting that "media criticism" is the wrong term. Just that people need a lot more background to understand what "media" actually is.
Maybe an approach to this could follow the model of algebra and calculus?
Students who take and show competency in pre-algebra qualify to move on to higher level maths building foundational knowledge for the more complex systems.
It wouldn’t necessarily have to be 1:1 in the model and structure of classes, but that’s my thinking. Media literacy shouldn’t be a one semester course, maybe not even a one year course, but instead a component of a radically different educational framework that informs our young students how to critique, analyze and reason their way through the digital frontier.
By no means would this kind of shift in education be easy, but in my mind ease is as much a threat to progress than hardship in some cases.
I took a critical thinking class in university, which covered deceptive messaging from advertisements fairly heavily. I'd like to think they all came out of that class no longer able to be fooled by this sort of thing, but I know it isn't the case.
It's easy to get people to question advertising, because they aren't emotionally invested. Once you stray into religion and politics, people often stop caring that they're hearing plainly untrue, or even self-contradictory, ideas.
Sure, I'm all for teaching it. It would still face the same issues as other education topics. Use science as an example. It is taught in schools. And yet, we still have a strong anti-science culture in the U.S.
I'd agree, with one caveat: there have been plenty of cases where groups push political or other controversial causes via the schools systems (see: the "teach the controversy" and "intelligent design" cases of trying to classify a deistic creation story as backed by science). I can easily see a world where media literacy classes are hijacked to teach the opposite of what ideally should be taught, in order to serve the needs of a few politicians rather than society as a whole.
critical thinking classes from kindergarten through the end of college.
i have developed a loose curriculum for the latter half of that pipeline, but getting the education uniformly distributed throughout the public mind market is the hard part.
I'm not who you were replying to but I think what people typically mean is instead of just being told X is true you help people come to the conclusion that X is true. One of the best way to do that is to understand both sides of an issue and come to the conclusion that one side is correct. Not only does it cause people to understand why they believe something but it causes them to understand why people on the opposite side of this topic believes what they do.
Many people are guilty of not actually understanding why people believe what they do. They will read arguments by people on their side but won't read the best arguments made by the opposite side. They will instead read the arguments by either people who make crappy arguments or by people on their own side explaining the opposition's view. This typically results in awful, often strawmen arguments for the opponent's views.
If teachers could set up debates between students on topics I think it would be good. Ideally, the student should disagree with the side they are supposed to defend, though isn't always possible. This will force them to look up the views held by the other side. The teacher should understand the best arguments on both sides and should step in when arguments are being made incorrectly or when a student misses a good response.
This of course would often times not work well because teachers don't understand their opponent's views so I am not sure how to actually handle this. You could possibly have a teacher with a different view help moderate the debate, but there is a disproportionate amount of teachers who are liberal (I've seen some studies that put it at over 80%) so it would not always be practical.
This doesn't always work on every topic like math, but it could be helpful in both English (for meaning behind books, poems, etc) and various history topics.
I am sure there are additional ways to help students learn critical thinking but this could be a good way if teachers are actually able to present both sides in a fair way.
As I said in another comment I fear the thread I’ve started here may be suffering from some creep. “Media literacy” as a topic definitely exercises the critical thinking muscles of the brain as a specific and applied school subject, but if the discussion people would rather have is the vague call to “teach kids critical thinking” and left at that, then I gotta go because that’s a conversation that is far less precise and will get really weird really fast.
