Critical Thinking Alone Can't Protect Students Against Misinformation
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses why teaching generic critical thinking skills isn't enough to help students evaluate misinformation — because a well-constructed false argument can pass every critical thinking test.
Key Takeaways
- Well-crafted misinformation passes critical thinking tests - A logically sound argument built on false premises will fool generic critical analysis
- Domain knowledge is essential - Students need actual knowledge about a topic to evaluate claims about it
- Critical thinking without content is empty - Teaching students 'how to think' without giving them something to think about doesn't protect them
Transcript
Is it possible to teach kids to spot misinformation?
I came across an interesting website called Thinking is Power that I think has some good articles on it, but also has an incorrect idea.
The idea that we can teach kids to spot misinformation by teaching them a generalizable set of skills that won't require them to actually have content knowledge in order to evaluate information and identify it as misinformation if in fact it is false.
I think this idea that we can teach this general set of skills and on the website she actually says teach skills not facts.
I think this is appealing for a lot of reasons, right?
It seems more general purpose.
It's like Why not have a multi-tool?
Why not have a Swiss Army knife rather than just kind of a single purpose piece of information?
Like the vibe here is very strong.
And I suspect that a lot of educators really like this vibe.
They hear this, oh, we can teach skills.
We can teach critical thinking.
Who doesn't like critical thinking?
Of course, critical thinking sounds great.
you know, the skill to identify fallacies.
And, you know, and I think certainly there's a lot on this website that's good about teaching the scientific method and teaching about logical fallacies and teaching about, you know, the quality sources and things like that.
The problem is none of this works without fallacies.
You cannot have a fact-free process for determining truth because reality is fact-specific, right?
It's not just about using sound reasoning and avoiding logical fallacies.
If someone says the earth is flat, they can say that without any logical fallacies, but it matters factually whether the earth is flat or not.
So I think we have to be very, very careful about these ideas about teaching generalizable skills.
And I think we have to remember that content is always king, right?
Students have to actually know stuff about the world.
We can't just teach them generalizable skills.
And we have figured that out in reading.
We're starting to realize content knowledge actually matters a great deal for reading comprehension.
It's not like you can just teach these general reading comprehension skills.
If you want students to comprehend what they're reading, they have to know the stuff that they're reading about.
They have to have the vocabulary.
They have to have background knowledge about the world.
And that's why the best reading curriculum now builds that background knowledge, builds scientific and historical and vocabulary background knowledge so that it's not just treated as this empty skill.
And I think in both reading and in science, that empty skill doesn't exist.
There's no content neutral skill there to develop.
So as appealing as critical thinking sounds, as good as the vibe of critical thinking is, I don't think it can prevent students from accepting misinformation.
I think in order to inoculate students against misinformation we have to give them true information let me know what you think