“Critical Thinking Olympiad” wins EESC Civil Society Award

Brussels – The Slovak Debate Association has won the 15th Civil Society Prize, awarded by the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) on the final day of the Civil Society Week. The “Critical Thinking Olympiad” project, structured as a three-round competition for three age groups, where students take on real-world media challenges, was awarded €15,000. The tasks reflect content that young people encounter daily, such as evaluating Instagram posts, analyzing TikTok videos, and testing AI-generated content. The project was highly successful, with nearly 9,000 students from 300 schools participating last year. The award will allow the Critical Thinking Olympiad to expand beyond the borders of Slovakia. “All of our materials are open source. We hope this will inspire similar initiatives across Europe, promoting a culture of critical thinking, media literacy, and resilience against misinformation,” the winners explained.

In second place came the French Reporters d’Espoirs with the “Prix Européen Jeunes Reporters d’Espoirs,” a training program for solutions-based journalism and the use of the French language among European and French-speaking young people under the age of 30, regardless of their status, education or training. Third place went to the Belgians of FEC Diversité asbl for their project Escape Game Extreme Droite, an immersive game that counteracts far-right ideologies. The games, varying in length from an hour to half a day or a day, offer participants a vivid experience, recreating living conditions under a fascist-style dictatorship. Both projects won a prize of €9,000.

At the award ceremony, EESC President Oliver Röpke said, “Civil society plays a key role in safeguarding European society from harmful polarisation, both online and offline, and in protecting our democracies from the rise of authoritarianism.” “For this reason,” he concluded, “the Committee decided to award the prize to organizations that prevent or actively combat this dangerous trend of division.”