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.
1000%. And the fucked up thing is that I didn’t (formally) learn about it until college, and even then, it was an elective course that basically nobody took. The only reason I ever took it was because I hadn’t declared my major yet. Turned out to probably be the most important classes I ever took throughout my entire education.
As someone in a STEM field, it’s a major bummer to see how one-dimensional a lot of my peers’ education was. And it becomes pretty obvious, pretty quickly.
I get why it’s silo’d like that, but I really wish majors like engineering would require a bit of a more well-rounded education. I may have inadvertently turned a 4 year program into 5.5 years, or whatever (plus all that additional debt), but I think it was worth it in the long run because now I can understand the reasons my society is collapsing while I watch, rather than just watching!