Don’t lots of people complain when education is too theoretical and they don’t get a sense of “how are we ever going to use this?”
Comment on Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools
Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi 10 months ago
I like that it’s a critical thinking subject, but it would be much better if you taught generic critical thinking, and used “recognising fake news” as a application for critical thinking.
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 months ago
What would “generic” critical thinking even look like? You need some subject matter to apply critical thinking skills to. News is already a very, very broad subject. What kind of critical thinking do you think is important but not teachable in the context of news?
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Teaching about logical fallacies, how the scientific method is supposed to work, etc.
Not so much that it couldn’t be taught in the context of news, but there are far more areas where critical thinking is needed.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 10 months ago
Science classes already exist. I was also taught about logical fallacies in high school—probably in English but I don’t really remember.
wreckage@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I agree. That’s what I learn when I was in school. We also had to identify objective and subjective texts
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Yeah we had to do something like that in History class, but I took the IB curriculum. I don’t think most standard secondary school History classes make you assess the Origin, Purpose, Value, and Limitation of a source.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
it would be much better if you taught generic critical thinking
That’s pretty much what you get from an English (or history) class in HS. Can you extract information from a text, can you synthesize information from multiple sources, can you interpret what the text means and support your interpretation based on evidence, can you understand motivations and perspectives of characters, and recognize information from unreliable narrators, etc.
Sometimes when a problem becomes immediate enough, teaching the general case isn’t enough. Not sure whether we’ve reached that point, but there’s a lot of general teaching that people complain isn’t specific enough. “Why don’t they teach how to do taxes?”-- because they teach math and following directions, and it theoretically shouldn’t be more complicated than that.
aidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Except education is not general, it is hyperfocused on topics that lead into higher education.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I can agree with that to a certain extent, but how is math not general? How is understanding characters from a book not general?
aidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
how is math not general? How is understanding characters from a book not general?
The general math and reading skills I learned stopped at 8th grade.
I didn’t need to write a 10 page paper on 3D trig for general math. Nor how to transpose a matrix.
I didn’t need to learn about, well actually in English I didn’t learn anything, we just kept doing the same imagery fan theorizing from 8th grade to graduation.
qaz@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think more practical examples and lessons would work better if they only allocate a couple lessons for it.
SCB@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Every school already teaches generic critical thinking.
Lots of people don’t learn it, but lots of people don’t learn basic algebra either. It’s still taught.
AmberPrince@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“Write 3 to 5 sentences explaining Gatsby staring across the bay at the green light of the far pier.”
This is a common type of prompt that most school systems use and in theory it fosters and develops critical thinking. Why would Gatsby stare at the light? What must he be thinking about? Why did the author choose a light? But (american) school systems never actually explain what critical thinking is. Only a set of minimum requirements that students struggle through.
I hated those prompts. They seemed like the teacher was just fishing for a specific answer. Sometimes the color doesn’t mean anything and the author thought it just looked nice. It wasn’t until I had a sociology teacher explain it with a poignant example that it really clicked.
He asked us “Is suspending a student good punishment?” He went on to elaborate that a student that skips class gets detention. Well if he skipped class why would he go to detention? So he skips that and gets suspension instead. This student didn’t want to be in school so the school ultimately punishes him by not having him in school.
Reductive and simplistic, sure. But the idea that you approach a problem or thought from many different angles to see all facets of it didn’t really gel with me until that moment. We need more of that. We need the “why” of critical thinking.
WashedOver@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Throw in science too…