Posted on 05/01/2007 11:12:30 AM PDT by Phil Harmonic
E-mail notification today from FactCheck.org announcing their new web presence, FactCheckED.org, purporting to help "high school students learn to think analytically"...
To our subscribers:This e-mail feels a bit like a birth announcement. Last Thursday night, we flipped the switch to start up a brand new website, a sibling to FactCheck.org. This one, though, is focused on helping high school students learn to think analytically.
The new site, www.FactCheckED.org, recognizes that kids are growing up in a world of ceaseless and instantaneous communication. Accurate and unbiased information can be an elusive commodity in this constant stream of messages – many of which are attempts to persuade the recipient to do or buy something.
Our aim is to help students learn to be smart consumers of these messages. To that end, we provide tools to help them dig for facts, debunk deceptions, set aside preconceptions and weigh evidence logically – and to help their teachers guide them toward good strategies for doing that. For educators, there is our Lesson Plans section. Most of the plans are framed around political or consumer advertising and lead students on a process of discovery to uncover the facts.
One section of the site, Straight from the Source, provides a guide to Internet research as well as a list of government, think-tank and advocacy group websites with our assessments of their reliability and what they offer. Our Dictionary is designed to help decode the bureaucratese and terms of art that often baffle the uninitiated. We invite you to explore.
We also invite your comments. If you have complaints about the site or suggestions about ways to do things better, we want to hear from you at Editor@FactCheckED.org. If you like the site we want to hear that, too. This is a new venture for us, and something of a work in progress. We’ll be offering more material as time goes on. You can help guide us by telling us what you find useful and what you don't.
Thanks, as always, for your support.
Viveca Novak
Brooks Jackson
Here's just a taste from their suggested "Lesson Plan" on "Fallacies"....
Background
[snip]
Finally, some arguments are bad not because they make false claims or because they commit some logical error, but rather because they are booby-traps for unsuspecting readers.
Dr. Roy Spencer, who is a prominent climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and winner of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, doesn’t think that humans are causing global warming (premise). So humans are probably not causing global warming. (conclusion)Formally speaking, there is nothing fallacious about this argument. It appeals to authority, but Dr. Spencer is fairly clearly an appropriate authority on the matter of global warming. So as far as it goes, this is a good argument. The problem, however, is that the argument leaves out an important bit of information, namely that the overwhelming consensus in the scientific community is that global warming is being caused by humans. But by suppressing important evidence, the argument is potentially a booby-trap for unwary readers.
Objectives
In this lesson students will:
- Learn to distinguish between different types of fallacies and booby-traps.
- Assess short arguments for examples of fallacious reasoning.
- Analyze longer arguments to for instances of fallacies or other booby-traps that might hinder good reasoning.
[snip]
Example 1: Whichever basketball team scores the most points will win the game. Virginia scored more points than UNC. Therefore Virginia won the game.
In Example 1, the first two sentences are premises and the third is the conclusion. The argument is valid, for the two premises provide genuine support for the conclusion.Example 2: Whichever candidate receives the greatest share of the popular vote will be elected President of the United States. Al Gore received more votes than George Bush. Therefore, Al Gore was elected President of the United States.
Example 2 has exactly the same structure as Example 1. The first two sentences are premises, and the third sentence is the argument’s conclusion. The difference, of course, is that in Example 2, the first premise is false. Getting the most votes is not the way one gets elected president. So Example 2 is unsound.
This is propaganda in its most rank form, targeting our grade school educational institutions to mirror-image the leftist ideological indoctrination of our Colleges and Universities.
Given the ideological bent of most School Boards, it's almost overkill.
This is disturbing
That’s funny... Consensus is not evidence. I think I’ll add that to my tagline.
Looks like just another biased, lefty site. Since they mention they are non-partisan, you can bet they are.
Wasn’t there a CONSENSUS that the WORLD IS FLAT?
This example, in turn, leaves out the critical bit of information that science does not rely on consensus to validate a proposition!
Facts are not determined with a popularity contest.
In other words, your self-described "important bit of information" is, in reality, entirely irrelevant!
Not in the last couple thousand years.
OK children, let's see if we can count the number of George Bush lies that I've written on the blackboard.Ready? Let's count together now...
one...two... (VERY good children!) ...three...four... (Excellent!) ...five...six..............
So, what are they trying to say here?
"Analyze longer arguments to four instances of fallacies..." ???
"Analyze longer arguments to for instances of fallacies..." ???
I'll be exploring that website later on.
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