Children will be taught how to spot extremist content and misinformation online under planned changes to the school curriculum, the education secretary said.
Bridget Phillipson said she was launching a review of the curriculum in primary and secondary schools to embed critical thinking across multiple subjects and arm children against “putrid conspiracy theories”.
One example may include pupils analysing newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help differentiate fabricated stories from true reporting.
In computer lessons, they could be taught how to spot fake news websites by their design, and maths lessons may include analysing statistics in context.
It always depresses me when people around can’t even do a crude estimation that would debunk unteuthful information. And this isn’t just about news - when you do any sort of math or experiment you should be able to make a crude estimation to eliminate mistakes.
I can easily tell when I’m two orders of magnitude away from the correct result. It seems to be a rare skill apparently