“…in the past, students could find clear and singular answers to their questions in carefully curated and government-approved textbooks, and they could trust those answers to be true. Today, they will find hundreds of thousands of answers to their questions online, and it is up to them to figure out what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong," the report said.There you have it...we were all a lot more educated with “carefully curated and government-approved textbooks.”Fewer than one in 10 students surveyed in the OECD countries could "distinguish between fact and opinion, based on implicit cues pertaining to the content or source of the information," the report said.
The only areas in which more than one in seven students demonstrated the ability to distinguish fact from opinion were the four parts of China, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Singapore and the United States.
I wonder how much higher the US would place on that list if we weren’t burdened with two large demographics of underperforming students not present in any other country in the top 20.
Sort of like how the US is somewhere near the top of the list in gun violence, but if you exclude the cities of DC, New Orleans, St Louis, Detroit, and Chicago from the gun violence stats we drop to 4th or 5th from the bottom.