Marc Romainville: Learning to think right by discovering why we think wrong

16% of young people believe that the earth is flat. Nearly 50% believe that the best method of getting information is to go online, compared with less than 10% who say they trust school more. These figures are alarming. And even more worrying: they're on the rise. Generally speaking, citizens are credulous about what they discover on the Internet. Learning to doubt is therefore a real challenge. The need is far from new, but today, with the development of digital technology and artificial intelligence, it is even more pressing. With examples like Trump, who doesn't care whether what he says to millions of people is true or false, we need to educate people in this discernment more than ever. Doesn't Trump's victory reflect the failure of the American school system? By teaching young people to think right from school, based on a better understanding of why they think wrong, they will become cautious, critical digital citizens who are aware of the traps laid by the sirens of disinformation.

In part, but not enough. Within French-speaking education in Belgium, there is very clearly an awareness of the urgency and necessity of educating for doubt. In fact, this is one of the major thrusts of the Pacte d'Excellence, which is implementing a series of educational reforms from kindergarten to the end of secondary school. However, education in critical thinking is not sufficiently integrated into curricula. It should be part of every subject, from science to French, mathematics and history. What's more, schools don't know how to implement this learning.

This is the subject of my book (1), in which I develop a method for teaching critical thinking for the digital age. At the heart of my proposal is a pedagogy of metacognition, extended to thought processes. The first step is to make students aware of their own "me-thinking" mechanisms, i.e. their spontaneous and sometimes fallacious reasoning. Students must also be made aware of the biases that lead them to be excessively credulous. In other words, when confronted with a piece of information, students need to ask themselves spontaneously, but reasonably: "Is it right? How can I tell if it's right or wrong? At present, the education system has too much of a tendency to do this for the student, to tell him or her what is true and what is not. Yet there are a multitude of fairly simple techniques and activities to be carried out at school that train doubt, when necessary.

(1) "À l'école du doute", Marc Romainville, Presse universitaire de France, 2023

Because it takes time, and so we'd have to give up certain program elements in favor of educating people to doubt. But education is an ocean liner. To change direction just a little, you have to put a lot of energy into it. You have to convince a lot of players: politicians, teachers, inspectors, parents, etc. All of this leads to a certain inertia. All this leads to a certain amount of inertia. You can see it in every educational reform: there's a certain slowness in implementing change.

Of course. In recent years, the school, through the Pacte d'excellence reform, has changed its habits. It has adapted even better to the needs of our society. Real progress has been made in digital education, culture and the arts. Or in the introduction of the first reference framework for kindergartens. These are successes that we'll be able to accurately assess with the CEB exams in 2026.

Climate change education. This is also a central issue. At UNamur, we are already conducting research on this subject to determine the role of schools in this area. Here too, the need is great and urgent.