I think a lot of what people are missing is around spoken techniques.
- Recognising ad hominem attacks.
- Recognising straw-man arguments.
- Recognising circular reasoning.
- Spotting embedded assumptions or premises in points.
- Being numerically literate enough so that big numbers have context.
Yes, these things apply to texts also, but they can fly past you when somebody is speaking. You can’t take 30 seconds to notice that somebody is arguing against something which wasn’t said by the opposition. It has to be a reflexive “hang on a minute! That’s BS”.
flamingos@feddit.uk 1 month ago
For me at least, most of that was just identifying rhetorical devices used by the writer and summarising what they wrote, not looking at the legitimacy of what’s being said (it’d be hard to do that in an exam context anyway).
wren@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Yeah, there’s definitely a difference between curricula, what’s focussed on in classrooms, and exam assessment criteria, but they’re supposed to be cohesive.
I remember one of my big pieces of coursework was “writing from the perspective of an advertiser,” and we had loads of lessons on identifying bias. I was taught in school that “red top magazines” are “less honest and more emotive” than “broadsheet newspapers.”
Presumably not everyone had the same experience though: I mentioned this offhand and my friend told me “surely that’s illegal to teach in a classroom?!”