Teach Secondary Magazine

We hear a lot these days about the things that schools ‘should’ be
teaching children and young people. Sometimes,
these will be specific topics or subjects that don’t yet have a
formal place within the National Curriculum, but arguably
should. See financial education, for example – which,
depending on how the government responds to the Curriculum
and Assessment Review, may well be appearing in maths and
PSHE schemes of work sooner rather than later.
And then there are those suggestions for areas that schools are, in fact, covering already, albeit perhaps not as comprehensively as they’d like to be. The prime example of which must surely be ‘critical thinking’.
Everyone wants to see school students given a solid grounding in critical thinking. Employers, parents, think tanks, charities, policymakers – they all want today’s students to become savvy navigators of the modern information landscape, able to swiftly distinguish between the real and the fake, and pick up on not just the detail of what they see and hear, but why they’re seeing and hearing it.