Pushing back against the surge of misinformation online, California will now require all K-12 students to learn media literacy skills — such as recognizing fake news and thinking critically about what they encounter on the internet.

Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed Assembly Bill 873, which requires the state to add media literacy to curriculum frameworks for English language arts, science, math and history-social studies, rolling out gradually beginning next year. Instead of a stand-alone class, the topic will be woven into existing classes and lessons throughout the school year.

  • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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    1 year ago

    I mean that’s not a bad thing, either. Being capable of understanding an opinion you don’t agree with is incredibly important and very lacking.

    • LethalSmack@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The problem was it forced you to agree with that opinion. There was no thinking involved, only blind belief

      Critical thinking would allow you to understand opposing opinions while respectfully disagreeing

      • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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        1 year ago

        There was no thinking involved

        I actually wholeheartedly disagree. It’s easy to spout off your own beliefs, it’s harder to justify one you don’t already agree with. Critical thinking here would require you to understand where the article is coming from rather than writing it off entirely because you start from a position of not agreeing.

        Understanding an opinion while not agreeing with it is incredibly important. If you don’t understand a topic well enough to advocate for the devil, then you don’t understand it enough to have a conversation at all.

        This is literally what critical thinking is. It’s not “justify a position you already agree with.”

        • LethalSmack@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I disagree. You are only allowed to agree with the article using the articles own statements. If article states the sky was always red without mentioning anything else, then you’d have to agree or fail.

          No other views, facts, opinions, perspectives, etc was allowed.

          That is not critical thinking.

          That was how Missouri taught “critical thinking”

          • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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            1 year ago

            If you brought in dissenting opinions, then… That would just be a lesson on disproving articles, not actually learning how to understand opposing opinions.

        • quicksand@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          It’s an example of critical reading, not critical thinking. Reading isn’t thinking, they are different, that’s why they mostly have different letters in them

          • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
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            1 year ago

            I doubt you’ll change my mind on this, but feel free to keep trying

            You aren’t just reading it. You’re writing an entire-ass paper on the subject which would require actually understanding where the article is coming from in order to further extrapolate its opinion, otherwise you’d just be rewriting the article in its entirety which doesn’t seem to be the goal of the assignment.

            It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it