Background for this blog: I work with my high school’s We the People team. It’s an AP government class with a competition component. Students are broken into teams, each with a different emphasis on the constitution/American government. They have to write papers answering 3 multi-tiered questions and prepare for a round of impromptu questioning.
At virtual practice this week, my unit included a quote from James Madison in their paper, “knowledge will forever govern ignorance and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
Boy, some quotes do not hold up. When they finished reading the paper, my first question was “in today’s post-truth society, do you think knowledge really does govern over ignorance?”
What followed was a conversation that they were not ready for, so it turned into an opportunity for me to rant. Here are the cliffnotes:
One student argued that citizens today are more civically educated because they have more access to information. We then had a conversation about how we may have more access to information, but we also have more access to misinformation and disinformation. She continued to argue that any time you go on Twitter, there’s information about the presidential candidates’ political platform. I asked what platforms each president ran on. She did not have an answer. We as a society have become so used to information access that we do not realize that it’s not the same as being informed. The age of the screen rose to power so quickly, we as a society could not develop the critical thinking skills to cope with this new technology. We consume content, but we are not informed.
Another student argued that we don’t have any means of fact checking and this contributes to the spread of false information. I disagreed here too. (I will always agree with an all or nothing answer) Though we are still waaaaaay behind in curbing post-truth and mis/disinformation, we are finally getting somewhere (with only two months left in Trump’s presidency). Twitter now has the “this claim is disputed” denotation on any tweet that may be spreading false information. Major television networks have started to stop airing coverage of President Trump as a way to curb the spread of post-truth. To these attempts at curbing misinformation, I say:
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ReplyDeleteBrynn,
ReplyDeleteThis takes me back to my AP classes in a school full of mainly Republicans. I graduated with 112 people, if that gives any insight into the small town nightmare I came from.
Your students' comments were really interesting. I think a lot of students are shielded from the reality of certain situations being in high school and have little "real world" experience to pull from. I remember learning A LOT from just my first year of undergrad at Ball State because I was finally away from the influences that kept me from expanding my knowledge and becoming educated on political matters.
As for your questions about hyperbole, I tend to agree with you. As much as I love exaggerating things for effect, I think these statements get taken out of context all of the time. Same with jokes, references, metaphors, etc., honestly pretty much anything that needs context to understand. When we are consuming things through media so quickly and in a condensed format, we are missing the context needed to properly assess these statements.