The CRAAP Test - 240

 The CRAAP Test and other ways to sort out truth from….

One of the shortcomings of my K-12 education was we were taught a lot of facts but we were rarely taught how to think. The exception, though, I remember well. One of my teachers taught us that we needed to “think about” not just absorb what we were being spoon fed in class. He did this in a most profound way. He instructed us for a full week about the glories of Communism. He did this in absolutely serious convincing manner. At the end of the week I went home, and  I am sure a lot of my classmates also went home, thinking Marx and Lenin held the answers to the world’s biggest problems.

The next week he shredded communism with the same intensity he had spent preaching its glories. This was when I realized how important a broad education, being skeptical, and using my noodle was going to be the rest of my life.

The next big lesson came ten years ago when I started studying global warming. What I found ten years ago was there was a well financed war on science, especially climate science.* It was manufactured by pseudo-science BS artists and paid for by the fossil fuel companies. The most frightening discovery was most people had no mental armor protecting themselves from the lying. Few people had had an instructor like my wryly intelligent teacher who taught me to be skeptical and dig deeper. 

Hopefully today our education system is armoring our children against the onslaught of misinformation. Below are three websites whose mission is to give us the armor to fend off mis and dis information. If we value truth and our children’s future, this means teachers, and especially parents and grandparents, will find these websites wonderful information destinations.

If you are a curious type you may have been to them already. 

THE REBOOT-FOUNDATION.org

 Critical Thinking for the 21st Century

Reboot develops tools and resources to help people cultivate a capacity for critical thinking, media literacy, and reflective thought. Critical thinking is the skill that makes us human, the one capacity that truly distinguishes us as a species. In a time of vast technological change, the foundation aims to promote richer, more reflective forms of thought in schools, homes, and businesses. The foundation funds efforts to better integrate critical thinking in the daily lives of people around the world.


THINKINGISPOWER.com

Thinking is Power was created by Melanie Trecek-King to teach critical thinking in an accessible and (hopefully) entertaining way. If you want to learn how to save money, make better decisions, and avoid being fooled or harmed, this site is for you!

Melainie Trecek-King has written two informative articles in the “Skeptical Inquirer”. One is titled, “Teach Skills not Facts” and the other, “A Life Preserver for Staying Afloat in a Sea of Misinformation”

 CRAAPTEST.NET

The CRAAP Test is the acronym for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, and Purpose. It is not easy to find out whether the source is trustworthy to use as a tool of research or not. Sarah Blakeslee has developed the CRAAP Test with her team at California University, Chico. The resources must go through the five steps of skeptical verification before being considered worthy of being taken seriously.

We were warned we were mentally slipping in 1995. Carl Sagan warned us society’s, “combustible mixture of ignorance and power” was “going to blow up in our faces.”

It has. Acceptance of false conspiracy theories about election fraud, vaccines, deep states by Q, the mass shooting of school children, and the science of climate change are killing people and threaten millions more. This is the consequence of poorly trained minds.

As warned by Pope Francis, we cannot make good moral decisions unless we know what is true. Hopefully the three websites will help us to move to truth and towards better decisions.

Science Magazines which sent out the warning:

National Geographic: Mar 2015 “The War on Science”

Skeptical Inquirer: Mar 2018 “The War on Science and Knowledge”

Scientific American: APR 2017 “Inside the Echo Chamber”

 

 

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