What do educators do when the students whose intellectual growth they are entrusted with believe things that are false and dangerous—because the influence of the internet has led them there? When the most important content and character-building discussions in school are suspect—or banned? Or when, God help us, the President’s “Special Advisor” suggests that we shouldn’t be teaching undocumented students at all?
What is our moral obligation to the kids we teach, when it comes to truth—and how they form their own opinions and civic engagement?
Truth. That is a tough one, because there is always a divide between those who believe in truth and those who believe in Truth. It shapes how a teacher works in the classroom.
I was in college when I finally realized that English teachers could be roughly divided into two groups. In one group, you have the teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has One True Meaning, and so their job is to impart and transmit that One True Meaning to students (then test them on whether they can repeat it back to you correctly). In the other group, we find teachers who believe that a certain work of literature has a range of possible interpretations, and so their job is to help students learn how to sift and support their way through all of those and present well-supported conclusions of their own.
I am solidly in that second group. It may be the musician in me. There's more than one way to play "Honeysuckle Rose," and there's more than one way to play Hamlet, and there's more than one way to understand The Awakening. This doesn't mean you can just pull any old version out of your butt without any visible support from the work. But I think of these "truths" as a kind of strange attractor, where the variety of answers cluster around particular points, not entirely random, but not locked into a single coordinate, either.
We have plenty of first group people in the education world. The whole classical education movement rests on the assumption that there is One Truth, that a bunch of dead white guys found it, and all we have to do is just keep reteaching it to the youngs. It can become confusing when One Truth folks talk about their love of critical thinking, but what they mean is not "thinking that wrestles with and evaluates a variety of facts and ideas to draw its own conclusions" but rather "thinking that leads to the One True Conclusion."
So education includes this tension between Truth and truth. It's particularly visible in history, where some folks insist it is "divisive" to try to talk about a variety of viewpoints and interpretations, where some folks want to assert that there is just one Truth. There isn't. History is not a string of facts. History is a conversation, an ongoing discussion about what happened, why it happened, what it means, how we understand it.
News is, of course, just history that's happening right now, and we have a whole network of influencers and news-flavored baloney merchants trying to package it as One Truth immediately as it happens. And that bleeds into the classroom in a variety of ways.
None of this is entirely new. Hearst and Pulitzer and many smaller fish all made a bundle peddling manufactured baloney in newspapers. Even my own small town once upon a time had multiple newspapers--one for each political party's version of events. Students have always brought their own parents' beliefs to school with them.
But the social media and the algorithm-fueled outrage machine has exacerbated the problem a hundredfold. We're starting to catch up. Meta and YouTube just lost a big social media addiction trial. Instagram and YouTube were found liable for damage to children. Backlash against screens in school is building. But we still have a long way to go.
When it comes to knowledge of the world around them and what's happening in it, most students are an information vacuum just waiting to be filled, and there is too much garbage too readily available. Much of that garbage is designed to inflame rather than inform, which means that the consumers--particularly the young ones--are emotionally invested in those particular Truths
Schools can continue with "media literacy" and units about evaluating source material, but the actual content of the "news" has to be addressed as well, because it's very hard to make critical judgments when you don't know much about the topic. Civics and current events should be addressed, and students should be challenged regularly to cite their sources and back up their contentions. Teachers have to bite their tongues when the impulse is to simply refute or even ridicule the worst of the ideas students bring into classes. There is nothing more endlessly useless than an argument between two people who believe there is only One Truth and the only thing to debate is which Truth it is. One of the foundations of authoritarianism is "There is One Truth and I-- and only I-- will tell you what it is!"
So a two-pronged approach. One prong: a pipeline of various sources to get actual news and current history into classrooms, including the kind of civics education that everyone keeps calling for. The other prong: deliberately fostering atmosphere and practices for questioning everything. Would it be enough to counteract the outrage machine? I don't know, but it's better than just hoping.
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