Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said her curriculum review would embed critical thinking skills in lessons.

Children will be taught how to spot extremist content and fake news online under planned changes to the school curriculum.

Education Secretary 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”.

Pupils might analyse newspaper articles in English lessons in a way that would help weed out fabricated clickbait from true reporting. In computer lessons, they could be taught how to spot fake news sites and maths lessons could include analysing statistics in context.

  • wewbullEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    I think a lot of what people are missing is around spoken techniques.

    • Recognising ad hominem attacks.
    • Recognising straw-man arguments.
    • Recognising circular reasoning.
    • Spotting embedded assumptions or premises in points.
    • Being numerically literate enough so that big numbers have context.

    Yes, these things apply to texts also, but they can fly past you when somebody is speaking. You can’t take 30 seconds to notice that somebody is arguing against something which wasn’t said by the opposition. It has to be a reflexive “hang on a minute! That’s BS”.

    • wrenEnglish
      2·
      3 months ago

      Hugely agree, those would all be fantastic additions.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zoneEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Though I’m not British, I have an interest in your education system because I went to a school that taught, up until year 11, the British education system. Years 10 and 11 were IGCSE, which is an international variant of the GCSE.

      But in years 12 and 13 I took the International Baccalaureate. Which I have a lot of praise for in general, but particularly in regards to this aspect. One of the core components of IB that everyone has to take is Theory of Knowledge. It’s essentially an introduction to epistemology, including learning about logical arguments…and logical fallacies. It’s one of the most broadly useful things you can learn, and I think it should be in every high school curriculum.