Most public school kids can’t read or write at grade level. Many kids, particularly in big city Blue state schools, have spent the past year at home. Children in public school are falling further behind. And this is what Illinois has determined is the most important thing for high schools?
From Capitol News Illinois:
All high schools in Illinois would be required to offer instruction in how to understand and evaluate news and social media as part of their computer literacy courses under a bill that advanced out of a Senate committee Tuesday.
Sen. Karina Villa, D-West Chicago, argued in the Senate Education Committee that the bill is needed because vast changes in the media landscape that have occurred in recent years.
“In the digital age, the internet has become the primary public square,” she said. “Young people consume, create and share news throughout digital media. They debate and discuss social issues, politics and civic issues in online spaces. They’re also vulnerable to persecution and misinformation.”
Forget actual literacy. This is ‘media literacy.’
The idea here is simple, grade children on which news outlets are appropriate. According to public school teachers and their union.
There’s no way anything can go wrong.
According to the bill, that would include instruction on accessing information across various platforms; analyzing and evaluating media messages; creating their own media messages; and social responsibility and civics.
But Sen. Terri Bryant, R-Murphysboro, questioned how objective schools could be in teaching students how to evaluate news stories by separating factual news from “fake news.”
“What’s fake news and what is not fake news,” she asked.
Villa replied that teachers are trained in how to instruct students in media usage and that the difference between fake news and real news is the same as the difference between fiction and nonfiction.
“So the teachers themselves would be deciding what’s fake news, by their own opinion,” Bryant asked.
She asked hypothetically what would happen if a district decided that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was a liar. “They could basically say that anything Anderson Cooper says is fake news,” Bryant said.
Villa, however, said the instruction would just be designed to teach students how to verify information in a news story in order to evaluate for themselves what is accurate and what is not.
So, again, we’re not teaching students how to research, read, balance and think for themselves. We are teaching kids that Fox News is bad, Rush Limbaugh was a racist, and anything that talks about freedom, liberty, individual responsibility, and success are bad.
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