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.
Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools::undefined
I haven’t seen the current curriculum but this kind of thing was an area of research for me (the spread of information on social networks).
There was a study done - I want to say that it was about 40 years ago - that used a single lesson to teach young kids the basics of literary criticism and deconstruction so that they could dissect what the Saturday morning cartoon ads were trying to say. They were able to identify that the ads were implying that eating a sugary breakfast cereal would get you more fun friends to play with, and so on. A lot of it had to do with social pressures.
In any case, there was a measurable increase in the kids’ ability to resist being influenced by the ads, once they knew what to look for. I suspect they’ll take a similar approach here.
Nothing is ever going to be 100% successful, but if you pull back the curtain and show them that the Grand Wizard is just a little man pulling their levers, it’ll have a helpful effect on hopefully enough people to matter.
I haven’t seen the current curriculum but this kind of thing was an area of research for me (the spread of information on social networks).
There was a study done - I want to say that it was about 40 years ago - that used a single lesson to teach young kids the basics of literary criticism and deconstruction so that they could dissect what the Saturday morning cartoon ads were trying to say. They were able to identify that the ads were implying that eating a sugary breakfast cereal would get you more fun friends to play with, and so on. A lot of it had to do with social pressures.
In any case, there was a measurable increase in the kids’ ability to resist being influenced by the ads, once they knew what to look for. I suspect they’ll take a similar approach here.
Nothing is ever going to be 100% successful, but if you pull back the curtain and show them that the Grand Wizard is just a little man pulling their levers, it’ll have a helpful effect on hopefully enough people to matter.
This sounds like a more specific, more applied critical thinking course.
Fascinating.