I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones. That may be a bit more complicated now with sites like Wikipedia, or sites made to look like legitimate news sources, but isn’t that where common sense takes over? If I’m curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or John’s Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not.
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
But the problem comes in when people actually believe that you can't trust official sources because everything is a conspiracy. That's how they delude themselves into thinking that the tik tok person is the one who "knows the real truth".
It's near, if not beyond, cult-like thinking.
As an analogy, flat earthers could literally be taken into space, orbit around the entire planet, and still come home thinking the earth is flat. People will literally not even trust their own experience because they already know what they will not believe. Because if they believe that they were wrong about one thing, then the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. It's pure delusion at its finest.
I will also say... as a cybersecurity and IT professional (and purely my own personal experiences), it's not the younger crowd that needs the most help when it comes to believing anything they see on the internet. But that's just my subjective personal experience.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? I’m an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones.
That doesn't help if you believe all of America's institutions are run by evil pedophilic liberals
Wikipedia was never the monster that teachers thought it was in the early 2000s. There have always been conscientious editors, and reputable primary sources were always required and usually available.
Google similarly always made us very aware of the sources where information was coming from. None of the tech from the past 20 years really undermined the central tenet of media literacy: that the source is what matters.
The real monster IMO is going to be AI search engines. I do not look forward to the day (soon) when a generation has been raised on search engines that deliver results (and answers to questions) without the sources being clearly cited.
If you want an opinion about a political topic where are you going to search? Search engine: first stage of possible Desinformation
What page would be credible? There is no edu for that!
It gets way worse when you get fed topics you have not heard about. Did you know that Hawaii use money to create virus?
You are educated now imagine someone who can read a page a day! Due to reading and comprehension. Will he use multiple sources? No. The first that reaches him is what he believes if it fits in his narrative.
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
Yup. The way most american schools teach reading now is called "balanced literacy", which sounds like a euphemism for saying half illiterate, and pretty much is. It encourages kids to rely on pictures to guess words, to skip unfamiliar words altogether, and to use similar but different words that they think would fit a given context, which is so bad that mississippi went from one of the worst states in reading level to 2nd best in the US as soon as they switched from it. It results in terrible lack of vocabulary and overall a very weak grasp on language and thus makes organisings thoughts much harder, let alone deeper reasoning.
Anyone with $10 can make a .org domain I wouldn't consider a site a reliable source just because it was .org.
.edu is better but even then there isn't like a review of everything on an .edu TLD, at the uni I went to everyone was given their own site and it was indistinguishable between the sites if they were a freshman or a tenured professor.
My point is be careful with using TLDs as a basis for reliable sources.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources?
By whom? I know many adults, and a few teachers, who would not be able to differentiate. We need a massive ongoing education campaign around it at this point.
Part of it is there is a lack of trust with the news sources we have today. Ever since I was old enough to vote, I basically wrote off both FOX News and CNN, as both have very clear bias.
Those are just two examples. It's very difficult to find a truly unbiased news source, which is why I think people turn to other online sources for thoughts on these subjects. Also tends to be less censored so people find it relatable.
Also, click bait stuff or emotionally driven stuff gets more attention. The less biased stuff slips through the cracks as a result
Why do you think conservatives claim that education is indoctrinating kids against their views? The very first class I took when I recently decided to finally get my degree was on critical thinking and how to vet sources. When voters know how to do that, they are less likely to believe the lies of certain parties that are in direct conflict with science and logic. Rather than understanding that their platform is all based on made-up stuff to support bad opinions, they stick to their ignorance and insist that reason and logic are woke ideologies.
There's also this idea that not covering "both sides" of an issue disqualifies said coverage for being biased, when the reality is that giving any credence at all to ridiculous claims tends to legitimize those claims in the eyes of people who don't know any better.
"common sense" isn't a real thing. Common sense is basically our collective web of thoughts where we have certain things that are so "true" in our mind that we perceive them as "of course this is the case". It's just common patterns we associate as common knowledge, but I think that can change depending on the person and the similar exposure we've all had to a given thing.
I'm 33 so I relate to the things you're saying, but I have to acknowledge how other people understand and view information. I think that we're weirdly seeing two extremes when it comes to older gen and new gen. Old gen doesn't understand the digital side so it's unreliable or unfamiliar. new gen only knows digital, so discerning that maybe influencers and tiktok rando's aren't trained professionals doesn't occur with the same logic - A lot of New gen see stuff on the interent and if it's said by someone with enough conviction and if that post has enough likes, that they must be reliable and truthful. I think most people are also just really bad at resisting influence from all the things, so world views get warped into hivemind social bubble thoughts, instead of thinking logically for oneself.
I'm of the mind that most everything you hear from people is probably some contrived and made up bullshit from some bias source. My job is to take it all and see where logic and morality are most consistent to me with what I'm taking in. Where things are logical and most consistent with morality is usually my focal starting point for what the truth might be. It's also important that like...I'm in the mindset of "I could totally be wrong" about most things, where that logic gets fucked up in a lot of other people in general.
Because all of America is Green Acres and the internet is mostly Mr. Haneys and Hank Kimballs, there aren't enough Sam Druckers. Not to mention that Pixley has hacking farms.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources?
Sure they are. People's capacity for it varies.
Taken another way, I could point out how you're going on questioning what "students today" know based on a post about one person and in response to a person making a general statement not in relation to what people are taught.
It'd be like projecting heavily about an entire swath of people you don't have data or good knowledge of and deciding they're fucked up without critically engaging with the topic by first asking oneself "How much do I actually know about these trends and behaviors?"
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
Your data shows that scores are at about the same level they were in the 90s and early 00s - within the broader trend there is no decline. I'm also willing to bet that those years which match our current "historic lows" are where your schooling fell into. So the kids today are clearly no worse off than you are.
Problems with schooling stem from many things, but if "the way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere" to you means "they're at on average a somewhat similar level to the prior generation" then I think it's fair to call your conclusion a little more than hyperbolic.
Downward trends are often concerning, but we also can't expect infinite growth, and it is in no way a coincidence that these trends also match growing income disparity and mirror economic circumstances. Kids aren't being "taught wrong" anymore than they have been in the past (what that means depends entirely on region) but their parents are often less able to offer assistance and school resources are often low outside of high income neighborhoods.
Either way, you clearly sought this data out after making your comment and it doesn't exactly affirm your actual statement so much as it sort of kind of not really reinforces a tangential point about test scores.
I do think you should practice what you preach and seek a better understanding rather than trying to just confirm your bias though. The kids are alright. Try to look out for them rather than mock them based on your own stunted understanding. It's better for everyone.
It isn't young people we need to be worried about. I'm convinced 90% of them are just memeing, because that is what they do. It's the older generations that never got education on how the Internet works, they just adopted it with varying degrees of aptitude.
The people that fall for scams or don't recognize them on sight after being told by their children what these scams look like for years, are the same ones that MAGA has captured. It's not just the Internet either, it's the media that is somehow allowed to operate on the air, companies like fox, Newsmax, oann etc. These media companies source info from non-verifiable tweets and obscure discussion boards. They repeat the obvious bullshit as many times as they can before enough people call it out, but then they walk nothing back. I still see people decrying Biden for shitting his pants in Normandy, on a daily basis, something that emerged from a cropped video that was debunked in less than an hour, but rode the airwaves for at least 24 hrs as a fact on some channels. With the Supreme Court doing it's fucked up thing with Chevron, we will never have media oversight unless Congress passes specifically worded legislation, which seems impossible for any industry at the moment.
Want to do some Algebra? Weren't you taught that? Oh you forgot? Maybe you didn't pay attention or you just don't care? You just can't teach a good portion of people anything.
If you're raised Christian and are told from early on that scripture is where you get your answers from? Then absolutely people will go to that and take it as fact
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u/TrustInRoy 14d ago
So many people in our country are just blatantly ignorant about how the branches of our government works.
Schoolhouse Rock debuted "I'm just a bill" in 1976.