This thread makes me think I'm crazy, because I remember "news literacy" being taught in high school in the early 90s: we looked at newspaper and magazine articles, and evaluated the slipperiness of their wording, noted whether and what kind of sources they relied on, etc.
I distinctly remember realizing for the first time that you could tell a lie with a graph. I also remember seeing an "article" that was actually a disguised advertisement, which I would probably have overlooked in the past. Good class.
So, to me this doesn't seem new, but it seems like not everybody had that experience.
Still, I think the point of this article is not that schools have not taught those skills in the past, but that those fundamental literacy skills are now identified as 1) more important and tricky than ever, and 2) now there's a (branded) name for them.
It was always taught from place to place but I think what's new here is that it's being mandated for a whole state.
You might be getting a biased sampling of responses here in that people who haven't had it and don't know what it is might be the most vocal (or something else like that.)
I distinctly remember realizing for the first time that you could tell a lie with a graph. I also remember seeing an "article" that was actually a disguised advertisement, which I would probably have overlooked in the past. Good class.
So, to me this doesn't seem new, but it seems like not everybody had that experience.
Still, I think the point of this article is not that schools have not taught those skills in the past, but that those fundamental literacy skills are now identified as 1) more important and tricky than ever, and 2) now there's a (branded) name for them.