I didn't express my point well enough, and I made my life harder unnecessarily. I lumped together things that are true for different, overlapping reasons.
You cannot really teach computer literacy for a variety of reasons. The first is empirical. You evidently cannot. I have interacted with people who knew how to use computers in spite of school, and I have interacted with people who didn't.
The next reason is the rapid pace of change. If you had a "how to use computers" lesson in middle school in 2006, then almost none of that is useful 20 years later. You may have read things about modems and floppy disks in a textbook that was already outdated back then, and none of it would help you with an iPad. It gets worse. Modern UX is all about making computer literacy irrelevant. You don't have your files. You don't know what a program is.
Don't forget that many adults can't use computers, either. Boomer and gen-x people don't know how to use computers, but assumed new children were somehow born with knowledge of Windows Xp. For a brief moment, some millennials were considered "digital natives", but then the next generation grew up with iPads, and they didn't magically absorb knowledge about printers, projectors, VGA cables, ethernet, and Excel. Adults who didn't know how to use computers continued to assume that the zoomers were born with this knowledge.
Computer literacy is ill-defined anyway, and many skills and areas of knowledge that fall under "computer literacy" are not taught explicitly. You wouldn't think children will pick up basic stuff like percentages and triangles and sine waves, and then you can start maths class with the fun stuff like probability density functions. Hell, you start school with teaching children letters.
To really learn to use computers with confidence, you need an environment where you can fuck up, up to and including installing a virus or formatting your hard drive. You don't really actually need to format your hard drive, but you need an environment where you have the power to do this. At the very least, you need some kind of VirtualBox VM where you can do these things. In my high school's computer class, we had an extremely locked-down system that was clearly developed for Windows 3.1 and somehow ported to Windows NT, and it let is only run the programs the teacher explicitly allowed us to run, when he allowed it.
It's difficult to teach "critical thinking skills" when you're standing at the blackboard in a top-down classroom structure. When you tell children to critically evaluate what they read or watch, but the rest of the time you tell them the authoritative truth – and what you say WILL BE ON THE TEST – then they learn about critical thinking, but they get habituated into not thinking critically. They learn to listen, and they learn to regurgitate whatever you told them about critical thinking.
Well, the above would be true if critical thinking were a primarily a skill and a habit. It isn't critical thinking is about 15% skill, 30% habit, and 55% background knowledge. Sure, some of it is to learn about patterns of scams, hoaxes, and misconceptions, but most is about learning what is true, and to think, when you hear some new information, if that jibes with the other true things you already know.
You don't learn the habit of critical thinking in a classroom environment, and you cannot employ it in a classroom environment, and a lot of critical thinking is predicated on a certain level of personal development and emotional maturity, but you cannot learn "thinking for yourself" and "standing up for yourself" in a classroom environment, either.
If emotional maturity is the result of an emotional maturation process, then you cannot really teach it. You just need to wait.
But politicians and activists and education reformers often say "teach critical thinking" as if it were a monolithic skill, as if you could teach critical thinking on its own, out of context.
You can teach some of it. You can teach common scams/scam awareness, common misconceptions, logical fallacies, rhetorical tricks, and so on. That alone just won't get you very far, because critical thinking is not just a skill.
This works the same way as critical thinking. It used to work different in the 90s. I remember lessons about newspapers and sensational TV news, and then English lessons on broadsheets and tabloids. I also remember story after story newspapers got wrong, because one newspaper mistranslated something exciting that supposedly had happened half a world away. The world has changed.
These days, there's a lot of research, often with ready-made teaching materials, ready to be crammed into 7th grade curricula, about "spotting fake news" or "Internet literacy".
As with general "critical thinking", I think this is a fool's errand, because it is too skills-focused. These materials teach heuristics to "spot fakes" or "spot photoshops". Some strategies or rules of thumb are genuinely useful. Instead of trusting your friend who shared something on facebook, you should ask yourself if your friend has any knowledge on the subject matter, and if not, you should examine the source. Is it a random web site, or a reliable source?
But that only takes you so far. You can't reliably determine that a web site is fake or unreliable, especially if you don't have any domain knowledge to begin with. There is, just a priori, no reliable syntactic way to distinguish real news from fake news, and you cannot with any confidence know that Mitch McConnell didn't drop dead just after I posted this and as you are reading it, unless you know from a trusted source that he is still alive, or already dead.
Certain schools of "news media literacy" just focus on things that don't work, and textbooks may still focus on outdated ideas about print media, but the main problem is that even mainstream journalists struggle with obvious stories, so you can bet your ass teachers will the story isn't aligned with their politics, like the Steele Dossier alleging the existence of a Trump Piss Tape (fake) or the Hunter Biden Laptop story (real) or the Clinton mails released by Russian hackers (real, but obviously ratfucking). I switched out my examples from REDACTED with American culture war stuff, so it's more relatable and I don't doxx myself.
Basically, you can't trust any screenshot of a supposedly reputable source, and you can't determine that a story is true or false by its content or syntactic features alone. Sometimes fake news are really obvious, and sometimes the only way to understand what is going on is to do a lot of research to determine the truth. Sometimes, a story is fake, but there is a lot of incidental truth in there, and you have to work hard to spot the lie in a sea of bullshit and truths taken straight from Wikipedia.
If you actually taught children to be appropriately skeptical of the news, that could turn into a net negative where they don't trust even true news as adults (because the even correct reporting is insufficiently transparent and rigorous), or it could result in a situation that is perceived as a net negative by the people in charge of the curriculum, even though they are appropriately skeptical of certain news stories.
My own pessimism is largely the result of my own experiences in school, plus my knowledge of new developments in education since I left. The teachers who were supposed to teach me how to read a newspaper in the 90s and 2000s would themselves often get their information (and outrage) from glossy women's magazines or tabloids (think The Sun or The Daily Mail).
I have personally grown a lot more pessimistic about this topic since then, especially in 2009, 2013, 2016, and 2021. In 2009, thinking critically about media fell out of fashion, because old media people felt increasing pressure from the Internet, and old media circled the wagons. It was a whole thing. Starting around 2013, a lot of research into falsehoods on social media (complete with "think before you share" teaching materials), was just completely omitting the ground truth. Researchers often took the "truth" for granted in their experiments, without explaining how they knew what is true and what is not. Then, in 2016, the phrase "Fake News" was coined to refer to spoofs/copies of reputable news sources, like phishing sites except they don't want your information, they give you bad information. Then the Trump camp took Fake News and made it his own, along with "alternative facts", which didn't originally mean lies, but bullshit. Finally, there was a renewed push in 2021 to "combat misinformation" about Covid, often lumping misinformation and disinformation with what some people called "malinformation": Information that is technically true, but misleading.
I don't think there is such a thing as "the" scientific method. The demarcation between science and pseudoscience varies from field to field, and what counts as good method or sufficient evidence also varies. In order to teach "the scientific method", you have to teach broadly. There is a difference between lab experiments on animal behaviour and observing animals in the wild. There is a difference between geology and chemistry. There even is a place for vivid descriptions of case studies anecdotes, in the vein of Alexander Luria and Oliver Sacks, even though Sacks was a fabulist.
K-12 schools are ill-equipped to teach about the scientific process, not just materially, but structurally, because they teach the settled science, not the part that is still tentative. K-12 schools don't teach all the failed experiments, or those that went nowhere. Your physics textbook usually has a "clean" version of every experiment, constructed with the benefit of hindsight, and high schools usually don't teach that experiments can fail.
Now my own school was different, because I am a weirdo who went to a boarding school for weirdos, and my high school physics teacher was really scrupulous about experiments. We were supposed to write down our own observations, even if they disagreed with the textbook, and the point of the experiment was never to blindly replicate what our textbook said, and to tinker with the experimental apparatus until we get the "correct" results. Even so, our teacher had us set up experiments knowing what the result would be, and he confessed to us, upon our graduation, that he once faked the result of an experiment, because the actual effect was orders of magnitude too weak to actually produce a clear and measurable result, especially with the quality of equipment we had.
Universities teach the actual complexity of experiments, and the way things can fail, but K-12 schools usually don't.
As for epistemology, other pupils at the boarding school actually did Popper in their "philosophy and ethics" class (there was a lot of wiggle room in the curriculum), but I took theology and existentialism instead, purely because it was easier. Unfortunately, that teacher also taught arts and French and didn't understand the point of epistemology except as a philosophical exercise. Meanwhile, our teachers in physics and biology mentioned falsification, without ever connecting it to anything taught in other subjects on the humanities side of the building.
I know I am kind of contradicting my previous statements about science here. Science is a process, not a canon of authoritative facts. I stand by this. It is a process. The problem is that "science is a process" or "science is a verb" will not help you evaluate a claim about the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, or desert-dwelling amphibia, or about whales being descended from ungulates. You need to have all this background knowledge so your knowledge of "scientific method" is actually useful.
In order to teach "the scientific method" in an actionable way, you need to touch upon topics like statistics, error propagation, blinding, control groups, lab safety and cleanliness, and so on, and you need to teach how messy a lot of scientific research is. If you want to do this, you need to do so starting in 3rd grade, and ramp up in 6th, and build on top of the previously learned knowledge. There is more to science than just experimenting and writing things down.
You just can't do a unit on "epistemology" in 10th grade, not matter whether it is taught by the guy who also teaches you the Bible, or the lady who also teaches you about frogs. You can't do a unit on "the scientific method" in 7th grade, and then assume
Even if you learn about Bacon, Popper, Kuhn, or Kolmogorov in school, it isn't connected to the lessons about animal behaviour or optics or or geology.
Science, Part II: Applied Science
Okay, the above sounds rather nitpicky. Imagine the following scenarios:
There is a new Mythbusters style show on TV. They do some flashy experiments to test common misconceptions, urban legends, and life hacks. Assume they aren't outright faking their experiments! By looking at their experimental setups, can you be reasonably sure which of the experiments actually prove the point they are making?
There is an expert on on TV. He's talking about a topic you know little about. He's an author who wrote a book on the topic, a practitioner, or a professor in an adjacent field. How would you know whether his expertise is relevant to the claims he is making?
A late-night TV commercial wants to sell you a penis enlargement device. They say that the device has been clinically proven to work by the famous Besselheim institute in Zurich.
A scientist is quoted in a TV programme about space and nanotechnology. You get the sense that the segment has been edited down into a few juicy quotes. Can you tell which part is settled science, which is about ongoing research, and which is pure speculation?
You see an ad for some kind of supplement. It tells you that you might not have enough testosterone/red blood cells/cartilage/muscle/serotonin/melanin/sleep, and you need some zinc/maca root/iron/selenium/peptides/melatonin. You are curious about this claim, and you wonder how to even evaluate it. Can you think of at least three questions (better four or five) you need to research when evaluating a supplement? What kind of scientific study would prove that the supplement works?
You read a short newspaper article about ongoing research. Can you tell which stage the research is in, and how long it has taken from tentative hypothesis to here, and how long it will probably take from here to an application that might benefit you?
Can you detect a crank with a nobel prize?
There is a carefully worded TV segment about forensic handwriting analysis and graphology, or a carefully worded TV segment about homoeopathy and antibiotics. The presenter carefully avoids any claims about graphology/homoeopathy, but a psychologist/physician explains that there's no study that proves that it works. The presenter ends by telling the viewer that we should all make our own decisions. Name two reasons why a journalist wouldn't take a stronger stance. Name two reasons why it would be difficult to design and conduct an experiment that proves or disproves graphology/homoeopathy to the satisfaction of both a scientist and a true believer in graphology/homoeopathy.
My contention is that you cannot teach "science" or "the scientific method" as a self-contained unit or lesson, or as a skill, in such a way that it would help the student (and the adult he or she grows into later in life) answer these questions. The answer to "What is the scientific method" is not by itself actionable.
I. Education academia often teaches "critical thinking" or "computer literacy" or "poetry" as a skill you can learn and practice, and not as a habit, or as knowledge. If you have all the knowledge, then it is easy to see it that way, too. It is of course easy to err on the side of rote, and to teach "how to interpret the meaning of books and poems" by rote, so that your students will take away "blue curtains represent sadness, white flowers represent death, death is an important theme", when the actual importance of death in a story about a family over three generations is not symbolic, but following necessary from the events: When somebody dies, other people are thrust into positions of responsibility, have to manage the estate, have to deal with the fallout, will grieve the loss, will learn about family secrets. Similarly, you can go overboard and teach science as a canon of authoritative facts, but this will probably take much longer and be more useful than teaching "the scientific method" or science as a skill. In order to evaluate a news headline, or a TV show set during one historical era or another, you need a scaffolding of background knowledge. You need to be able to say "based on what I know, that doesn't sound right". Critical thinking as a skill is not that.
II. Trying to fix a deficit of "critical thinking" can make it worse, and will often make it worse. When you propose another "unit" or "lesson" or "module" on critical thinking, you're not really solving the problem, but research or activism will most likely produce a single item, a lesson, multiple lessons, or a collection of worksheets and lesson plans, but not a completely overhauled curriculum. Of course, sometimes reform is possible, and sometimes activist groups make a big deal out of integrating their demands into the curriculum instead of tacking them on. Even in the best case, you will end up with "critical thinking" in the English (or whatever your first language is) classroom, or the "scientific method" in the philosophy and ethics elective (or whatever it is called), and none of this spills over into biology. When you learn about owls, all the other stuff from English class goes out of the window. When you read about Herodotus in 6th grade history class, there is no connection to the 8th grade critical thinking module.
Even when critical thinking and skepticism are integrated into the curriculum, throughout the curriculum, when teachers try to get students to "think critically", students will usually stress out over what will be on the test, or what the teacher wants to hear, and will try to "guess the password".
III. The best teachers I had were not those who cared a lot about their students. The best teachers I had were those who were the most knowledgeable about their subjects, those who cared a lot about their subjects. I also had teachers who were knowledgeable but unpleasant, and teachers who were motivated but clueless, and young teachers who tried to be nice but got tired and jaded and aged 20 years before my own eyes. Anyway, the best teachers I had knew their stuff, but they also treated questions about their subjects as something you can look up or find out on your own, and as something you can think about. They didn't treat the textbook as gospel. To a good teacher, questions like "What if I put blue curtains on stage in a stage play?" or "When a tree grows, does its mass come from the soil?" have answers. A pupil can arrive at the right answer independently from the teacher, and reason about it. The worst teachers I ever had just didn't know about their subject, or didn't themselves believe that the subject they taught you was actually useful.
IV. Many teachers are quite gullible. They are horribly mired in woo, urban legends, conspiracy theories, astrology, palm reading, or alternative medicine. They read tabloids or believe something their uncle shared on facebook. They believe whatever thing they just heard about for self-serving or political reasons. Basically anything that isn't part of their designated subject is just up for grabs.
