Comment on Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 months agoit 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
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.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 10 months ago
I don’t think that’s what most people learn in terms of math. If you’re not going to college you probably don’t need trig or calc, but a basic understanding of algebra and geometry is useful IMO.
Sounds like a problem with a shitty school or poor teachers, rather than a defect of English lit education in general.
SCB@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I found why you think school doesn’t teach things that school definitely teaches.