A digital literacy class should be mandatory to graduate high school.

r/

I’m in high school and dumbfounded by how many of my peers don’t understand digital footprints or think critically about misinformation.

For example, someone in my history class earlier this week was dead-set, 100% convinced that Native Americans voluntarily left their land. It took 15 minutes of debate and coaxing from my teacher to find out he learned this from TikTok. The same guy scored a 33 on the ACT and got a full-ride scholarship to UNC Chapel Hill.

During class change, a white kid was going up to the minority kids and calling them slurs while filming it. He then uploaded it to the school’s TikTok cringe compilation account.

We need a class to prevent brain-rotting and clout-chasing before our brains fully form. I don’t understand why this isn’t standard practice already.

Comments

  1. AutoModerator Avatar

    Please remember what subreddit you are in, this is unpopular opinion. We want civil and unpopular takes and discussion. Any uncivil and ToS violating comments will be removed and subject to a ban. Have a nice day!

    I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

  2. AliciaXTC Avatar

    Fuck that, bring back shop and home economics, teach budget balancing and how to manage a loan.

    Those are fucking valuable.

  3. Resident_Course_3342 Avatar

    A regular literacy class should be mandatory to graduate high school, but here we are.

  4. genomerain Avatar

    I think a digital literacy class in highschool is a fantastic idea.

    I’m not sure if I agree that it should be a requirement to graduate, though.

  5. howard2112 Avatar

    Personal finance should be the top priority, understand how a mortgage works. Understand personal debt,

  6. Uhhyt231 Avatar

    That same person ‘who learned it from TikTok’ is related to someone who ‘read it somewhere’. Sense wasn’t distributed equally

  7. CaptainObvious1916 Avatar

    This would or should be part of media studies in general. However, I have no idea how schools could make this effective in the age of TikTok etc. That stuff seems to be engineered to be seductive to susceptible people.

  8. PsychologicalMurl Avatar

    A lot of this seems like something the schools should’ve taught without needing a whole class lol.

    Also clout chasing isn’t something that can be stopped. There’s thousands hell probably millions of clout chasers throughout history. Shit ain’t just a internet thing. Hell you could argue the boy who cried wolf was a clout chaser lol. 

  9. Zhjacko Avatar

    I’m kinda surprised this isn’t already a thing

  10. IndependenceSelect54 Avatar

    I wouldn’t just stop at digital literacy, but extend that to behavioural psychology, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, heuristics and overall proper discourse.

    It’s wild that corporations know more about logical fallacies than average people do and exploit them for corporation gains while everyone is none the wiser.

    And it’s wild that every single person in the world has to deal with other people but what do average people know about behavioural psychology?

  11. agent-bagent Avatar

    None of this relates to digital literacy. Your brains are just rotted to shit from social media

  12. BespectacledSloth Avatar

    >was dead-set, 100% convinced that Native Americans voluntarily left their land

    Do… Do they not teach the Trail of Tears in school anymore? This was like 3rd-4th grade when I was in school. And repeated pretty much yearly (albeit the blurbs about it got progressively shorter) as part of standard history classes.

    It is astonishing to me some of the scandals that hit the news, and worse are the ones that don’t. So many Tiktok drama pages (that, arguably, get more views than the newspieces do) reposting/shaming some of these kids that are filming themselves doing crime and exemplifying the worst of humanity.

    I can’t imagine how many kids lives are going to be impacted by their online activity years from now, especially the ones that use their full legal names on social media. Forget a background check, their future potential employers are going to pop their name into Google and find a laundry list of reasons never to hire them.

  13. firebirdzxc Avatar

    Where I’m at it is

  14. I-Am-Willa Avatar

    I would love this, but in this administration it would be a nightmare. They’re actively trying to rewrite history and can see this backfiring really fast. I think we have to find a way to protect the facts first. I live in a red state and the “facts” that are being pushed on our kids terrifies me.

  15. KittyKittyowo Avatar

    OH MY FUCKING GOD YES

  16. court_swan Avatar

    They did that years ago in “library” class. It was along with everything else library related. Understanding credible sources is normal. Also the idea that a persuasive essay is meant to persuade you about something and to acknowledge and notice that.

    They don’t have art music library nada anymore. Kinders don’t even get naps. It’s going down hill farther and farther each year.

  17. Chriskissbacon Avatar

    Your generation I already tried to do a segment on media literacy and spent the entire class dumbfounded when they told me the police never lie, and this was right after George Floyd. They saw a tiktok saying he overdosed. You would need to start in 7th and do the class every year, but there’s no time in the school year. I already have 4 holocaust deniers and half the class thinks Hellen Keller isn’t real.

  18. Jaegons Avatar

    Step one would be finding teachers who would agree on the curriculum and/or have relevant experience 😞

  19. Wonderful_Rule_2515 Avatar

    The class you are advocating for is basic English and reading classes that are required through all twelve grades.

    This is where context clues, critical thinking, and literacy are taught. Books and social media is all just information and English classes exist to teach you how to process information & form your own opinions.

    Unfortunately, those classes are not effective if your country is known for its poor education and illiteracy.

  20. hiirogen Avatar

    I’m more concerned about literacy than digital literacy but you make a good point