Teaching Critical Thinking When You Can't Trust What You See

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Teaching Critical Thinking When You Can't Trust What You See

Manipulating images and information isn't new. Stalin airbrushed people out of photographs. Tabloids have always existed. Propaganda is ancient.

But something fundamental has changed.

The recent Brooklyn Beckham situation is a clear signal. Claims were made about an event at his 2022 wedding. No authentic footage exists. Within hours, AI-generated videos appeared showing what supposedly happened. Videos that got millions of views and likes. Many people knew and didn't care that they were fake. They were entertained. Their curiosity was satisfied. They moved on. As one expert put it: "There are people who are hungry for a particular kind of content, and if you can create that content for them, they will eat it up. Here's a moment where, if you want to believe it, you will, and those are the moments where we have to resist."

This is happening everywhere. Synthetic "historical" photographs circulate with captions claiming they're from the 1940s or 1960s. Viral videos that may or may not be real. Audio clips that sound like someone said something they never said.

The barrier to entry collapsed. Anyone can generate this content in seconds. Just a prompt. People are creating fake evidence to fill narrative gaps. When real footage doesn't exist, AI fills the void. The synthetic version becomes the default memory. Researchers call this "learned helplessness." The feeling of "I'm never going to be able to know whether anything's real anymore, so why bother?" As one information science professor noted, even these seemingly frivolous moments are "over time, wearing us down."

We genuinely don't know what percentage of what we see is synthetic. And our kids are forming their information consumption habits right now, in this environment.

The habits kids develop at 8 or 11 or 13 are getting baked in during a uniquely challenging moment. How they encounter information, what they trust, whether they pause to evaluate. The skills that matter now are the same critical thinking skills we've always valued. We just need to be more intentional about teaching them.

Teaching kids to think critically at the speed they consume content means teaching questions.

For younger students (K-4):

• "How do you know that?" as a regular, curious question
• Distinguish types of content: "Is this someone's opinion or something they observed?"
• Notice feelings: "Does this make you want to feel a certain way? Why?"

For middle grades (5-8):

• Source awareness: "Who made this? What might they want?"
• Claim versus evidence: "What's being claimed? What's the evidence?"
• The pause: "Before you believe, share, or react, what questions do you have?"
• Triangulation: "If this were true, what else would we expect to see?"

At Brookwood, we're in the process of updating our technology curriculum to prepare students for a fundamentally different information environment. The question isn't just what tools to teach, but what thinking skills will matter as technology continues to change exponentially.

We're building an approach focused on intellectual independence, critical evaluation, and the capacity to navigate uncertainty. These skills transfer across contexts and technologies. They matter whether the challenge is AI-generated content today or whatever comes next.

We're sending home a brief survey in next week’s newsletter. Your input will help us understand where families are, what you're noticing, and what kind of support makes sense. 

The work of evaluating information requires intellectual independence, productive struggle, and the capacity to make informed judgments. The same skills we're developing across academic contexts. When you can't trust the signals automatically, you need to trust your own capacity to think. That capacity develops through practice, through friction, through the work of actually thinking. This is new territory for all of us. The survey is a chance to share what you're noticing and where you'd find support helpful. 

David Saunders
Director of Leadership, Changemaking & Technology