Kristina Kroot is a human-centered AI advocate and brand and communications strategist. She writes about AI, technology, psychology, and public impact on her Substack.
Cristina Patrick is an Equal Employment Opportunity Specialist, AI safety advocate, and the creator of The Responsible AI Brief. Her work lives at the intersection of technology, human rights, and institutional accountability.
There’s a debate that resurfaces every few years in education circles and it is especially trending right now in AI circles as well: can critical thinking be taught? Or is it something you either have or you don’t, a kind of intellectual disposition that emerges on its own, if you’re lucky?
Finland has been answering that question for decades, and their answer is yes. You just have to start early and take it seriously.
Since the 1990s, Finland has woven media literacy into its national curriculum as a foundational skill introduced at age three. Preschoolers begin learning how to think about information before they’ve learned to read it. By the time Finnish students are in fourth grade, they’re studying how to evaluate whether they can trust a news story. By upper secondary school, they’re receiving a dedicated ABC Book of Media Literacy, distributed to every 15-year-old in the country.
Critical thinking is like a muscle and we need to practice it.
The results speak for themselves, in fact Finland consistently ranks at the top of the European Media Literacy Index.
The curriculum was designed explicitly to make citizens resistant to Russian propaganda in the 90’s. Finland shares an 832-mile border with Russia. They understood early that disinformation isn’t just annoying, it’s a national security threat. Media literacy became a form of civic defense.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Finland’s subsequent entry into NATO in 2023, teachers were asked to go further, adding AI literacy to a curriculum. The threat had evolved. So did the response.
Finland didn’t panic and create a separate AI curriculum. They didn’t hire consultants to build something new from scratch. They simply extended the same approach they’d been using for decades. The same structural questions students learned to ask about news articles, they now ask about AI outputs. The same critical evaluation skills they practiced on photos, they now apply to AI-generated images. They treated AI literacy not as a brand-new subject, but as the next chapter in an ongoing education about information, trust, and power.
The United States faces a different version of this challenge. Our information threat isn’t contained to one border or one adversary. It’s diffuse, digital, and coming from all directions. AI-generated deepfakes of political candidates. Manipulated videos spreading faster than fact-checkers can debunk them. Foreign and domestic actors using AI to create and amplify division. Conspiracy theories that sound increasingly plausible because AI can generate “evidence” to support them.
And we’re navigating this during a period of deep political polarization. Finland has its own political tensions, but they come from a foundation of decades-long consensus politics and shared institutional trust. Both sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. are targeted by AI-generated misinformation. Both sides spread it, often unknowingly. But AI doesn’t care about your politics, it just cares that you share it.
Finland recognized that a democracy can’t function when citizens can’t agree on what’s real. They invested in critical thinking as infrastructure, the same way we invest in roads or power grids. We’re still debating whether we can afford it. Meanwhile, our students are growing up in an information environment more hostile and more sophisticated than anything Finland faced in the 1990s, and we’re sending them into it with almost no preparation.
Finland’s developmental approach shows that critical thinking behaviors, such as slowing down before sharing, checking a source’s credibility, and asking who benefits from a particular narrative, can be practiced and eventually internalized. Complexity is deliberately calibrated to the student’s age, each stage builds on the last, so that by adulthood, skeptical inquiry is a natural reflex.
This is also why integrating critical thinking across subjects matters so much. When evaluation skills only live in one class, students learn to apply them in one context. When those same skills show up in history (whose perspective is missing?), and in literature for instance (why did the author frame it this way?), students begin to understand that critical thinking is a way to understand the world.
Schools in the U.S. are racing to add AI to classrooms, pushed by government policy and a $4.2 billion ed-tech industry eager to sell them tools. As education researcher Benjamin Riley notes, these efforts tend to be “pro-hype,” giving only perfunctory attention to AI’s limitations and rarely teaching students how to use it effectively or when they shouldn’t use it. Tool training produces students who can write better prompts. Critical thinking produces students who can evaluate whether the AI’s answer is useful, accurate, or fair.
Here’s what happens in most U.S. classrooms right now. A student asks ChatGPT to explain the causes of World War I. The AI provides a coherent answer. The student copies it into their essay. Done. At no point did the student ask: What perspectives is this answer centering? Whose voices are missing? What would a historian from a different country say? Without critical thinking, AI literacy becomes faster plagiarism.
AI literacy is the newest layer of this challenge, and in many ways the hardest, because AI-generated content is improving faster than our intuitions about it. The skills that helped people spot a clumsy deepfake two years ago won’t be enough next year.
Traditional education would teach critical thinking first, then add AI literacy later. Build the foundation, then build the house. But we don’t have that luxury. Students are already using AI. They’re already encountering AI-generated content in their feeds. They’re already trusting AI answers.
That is why in Finland, they teach students to ask structural questions: Who made this? Who benefits from this? Why? What would I need to verify it? What happens if I’m wrong? When they added AI literacy to their curriculum, they didn’t create a separate course. Students who spent years learning to spot fake news and evaluate sources simply applied those same skills to AI-generated content. A fourth grader learns to evaluate a news story and learns to identify if an image was AI-generated in the same lesson. A high schooler creates content using AI and simultaneously learns to interrogate the biases built into the tool. The critical thinking muscle and the AI literacy muscle are the same muscle.
This is the investment most AI literacy efforts are still failing to make. Too often, the conversation gets stuck on tools, how to use AI responsibly or how to spot a generated image, which are important. But they’re strategies and what we need is to build foundations. Most U.S. AI literacy initiatives teach students how to detect deepfakes. They teach students to write better prompts. But they skip the bigger questions. Why was the AI trained on certain data and not others? Who profits when kids rely on AI for homework? What happens to learning when we outsource thinking to machines? Without those questions, we’re just teaching students to be better customers.
And to take a step back, even media literacy is not universally or consistently taught in U.S. education. It tends to be provided in a patchwork approach, which we are now seeing repeated with AI literacy. Without the underlying habit of structural questioning, students who can identify today’s deepfake will be just as vulnerable to tomorrow’s.
Finland’s model works because of decades of investment, strong public trust in institutions, and national consensus that protecting democracy requires educating critical thinkers. Educators in the U.S. face a different landscape. Underfunded schools. Politicized curricula. A tech industry that markets AI as a solution to education’s problems when it actually creates new challenges to navigate.
But there are lessons from Finland that we can adapt:
Start younger than feels reasonable. Finland teaches three-year-olds to think about what makes information trustworthy. American elementary schools can do more than ban ChatGPT. They can teach students to ask questions about it.
Integrate across subjects, don’t isolate in tech class. Critical thinking about AI belongs in history class when students analyze sources, in English class when they evaluate narrative perspective, in science class when they examine how data becomes knowledge. Every subject needs this, not just computer science.
Teach structural questions, not detection tricks. The tells that help students spot today’s AI-generated content will be obsolete in months. The habit of asking “Who made this? Who benefits? What am I not seeing?” will last a lifetime.
Frame it as civic preparation, not just career preparation. Finland’s pedagogical specialist Kiia Hakkala said that having good media literacy skills is “a very big civic skill” that is “very important to the nation’s safety and to the safety of our democracy”. American educators should do the same with AI literacy. We’re raising citizens who need to participate in a democracy where AI shapes what they see, believe, and understand.
The gap between Finland’s approach and America’s current trajectory comes down to belief and investment. Do we believe critical thinking can be taught? Are we willing to invest in teaching it before it’s too late? Here’s what you can do:
For Parents:
Ask your school what they’re teaching. Most schools have some form of digital citizenship or technology curriculum. Ask specifically: Are students learning to question AI outputs, or just how to use AI tools? Are they learning to identify bias in algorithms? Are they discussing who profits from AI and who might be harmed?
Advocate at school board meetings. Twenty-five states now have media literacy laws on the books. If your state isn’t on that list, bring it up. If your state has a law but your district isn’t implementing it well, say so. School boards respond to parent pressure.
Connect with local advocates. Media Literacy Now has an Advocacy Toolkit for Parents and Individuals with simple ideas, activities, and resources to get started. You don’t have to become an expert. You just need to start the conversation.
For Educators:
Integrate, don’t add. Teachers are already stretched, so they appreciate having materials they can incorporate into existing lesson plans. You don’t need a standalone “AI literacy” class. Build critical thinking about AI into the subjects you already teach. When students research in history class, teach them to question AI-generated summaries. When they analyze literature, teach them to recognize whose perspectives AI centers and whose it ignores.
Demand professional development. State leaders should ensure that teachers across content areas are developing a generation of students who can think critically about the massive amounts of media they consume. If your district is investing in AI tools but not training you to teach critical thinking about those tools, push back. You can’t teach what you haven’t learned.
Partner with school librarians. School library media specialists often lead the charge for media and information literacy in schools, and where there is instruction, libraries are the primary hubs for it. They have expertise and resources. Use them.
For Everyone:
Support statewide policy change. Many bills that have passed around the country are the product of direct efforts of state-level Media Literacy Now advocates. Contact your state representatives. Tell them you want comprehensive media literacy and critical thinking education, not just tool training. Tell them it should start in elementary school, not high school. Tell them teachers need training and resources, not just unfunded mandates.
Make it bipartisan. Media literacy legislation in states like California, Delaware, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas has passed with bipartisan support. This isn’t a left or right issue. It’s about ensuring the next generation can think for themselves in a world flooded with AI-generated content.
The good news? 84% of Americans believe that media literacy education should be required in schools. The demand is there, now we need the action to match it. Finland answered the question decades ago: Yes, critical thinking can be taught. But only if we start early, integrate it everywhere, and commit to it as seriously as we commit to teaching reading and math. The question for us isn’t whether it’s possible. It’s whether we’ll do it before an entire generation learns to trust machines more than they trust themselves.
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