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Comment by bpyne | Hacker News Reader

Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.

Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.

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sort of a tangent, but I wonder if the emphasis on proper scholarly citations gets in the way of the actual critical thinking part. when I was in middle/high school, most of the teachers seemed to care more about us following the APA/MLA format perfectly and using proper "authoritative" sources than whether our arguments actually made sense. I was never very efficient at making bibliographies or sifting through academic papers, so I felt a perverse incentive to cite as few sources as possible.

the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...

Good point.

Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.

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