Vzdělávání

The Discussing Critical Thinking project is co-financed by the European Solidarity Corps and thanks to it, a group of young Agora lecturers were able to implement a project in 2021 that built on their experience and helped young people from the Ústí nad Labem region to develop knowledge and skills in how to work critically with information and how to form and defend their opinions, thus also contributing to the development of greater tolerance and respect for other people and their opinions.

The project involved seven trainers who implemented the project in turn: Pavla Bednáriková, Kristýna Zinková, Marie Hamerová, Matyáš Borovský, Jan Ruml, Štěpán Svoboda and Jitka Vlčinská.

The text is interspersed with photographs documenting the project – examples of seminars in schools and especially the largest discussion meetings.

Project context:

In today’s fast-paced world, young people use the internet to seek information and communicate, where hoaxes, fake news, half-truths and unverified information are increasingly common. At the same time, the trend is to read only the headline instead of the whole article or news, giving people the feeling that they are informed. And it is on the basis of such abbreviated and fragmentary information that young people then form opinions that are increasingly radical and racist towards other opinion groups. They form prejudices, they do not know how to be tolerant of other people or their opinions. Today’s young people do not know how to approach information critically, they cannot and will not read, they cannot form their own opinions on the basis of substantiated information, and they cannot even formulate their thoughts in a meaningful way.

Main challenges and objectives of the project:

1. To prevent the development of prejudice, intolerance, xenophobia and racism towards other people and their views.

   Prejudice and other manifestations of intolerance or hatred are often caused by thoughtless acceptance of information and ignorance of the issues. Therefore, in the project, students will first learn to find out information about the issue, look at it from several sides and learn to express their opinion correctly. They will have the opportunity to do this in school programmes where they will practice arguing in several debates on different controversial topics and where they will have to think about the arguments for and against, but especially in a debate meeting where several such debates will take place.

2. Teach young people to work critically with information.

   It is necessary to be able to navigate the mass of information that flows daily through social networks and the Internet. Participants in the programmes will therefore learn to identify sources of information, search for them and work critically with them in workshops in schools. They will also learn about the problem of misinformation, haox and media manipulation. This information will be passed on to them by the lecturers – members of the implementation team – and then the programme will put everything into practice by giving students a variety of sources of information from which to draw their arguments for mock debates. In the same way, they will then prepare for the discussions in the debate meeting.

3. Teach young people to form and defend their opinions.

   It is important to be able to form an opinion on the basis of substantiated information. Participants in the programmes will therefore learn to formulate arguments to support their opinion and learn how to express and defend their opinion in a debate. Based on the information that the students learn from the tutors on the programmes, they will have to formulate their opinions and ideas into arguments to be used in debates – either in workshops in schools or then in a debate meeting.

Project implementation:

In 2020 the preparatory activities of the project started – training of the team of lecturers and planning of activities, however, the educational activities implemented for students in Ústí nad Labem region had to be postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

In autumn 2021, five seminars for students were successively held:

5.10. Gymnasium Litoměřice

13.10. Business Academy Ústí nad Labem

20.10. Gymnasium Teplice

3.11. Gymnasium Chomutov

8.11. Gymnasium Ústí nad Labem

The project culminated in a debate meeting on 19.11. in Ústí nad Labem, which the lecturers prepared for students from all five schools to practice the skills acquired in the seminars also in the debate meeting, where they competitively debated a number of current controversial topics.