Teach "fake news"? You bet we should!
Should schools teach about "fake news" says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's education director:
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I have no interest personally or professionally in what is in the PISA tests; they are at best an irrelavance as far as I am concerned, and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real business of education.
I do however completely agree that we need to teach our young people the skills to evaluate the information that they are bombarded with. And it's not something you can necessarily put into an exam.
We are bombarded with information which puports to be valid and true: the President of the United States of America tweets lies and then denies it. For Trump, and many like him, words have power but no weight - he uses words to influence the credible and then blames someone else for putting the misinformation into his hands. You have to admire the balls on the guy.
History departments do a great deal towards students' evaluative skills already. They teach students to question the type and validity of sources, but despite their good works I fear that learners do not transfer the skills to other subjects let alone to the "real world". They can tell me all about WW1 recruitment posters and how they were designed to manipulate young men into believing that war would be glorious and noble and then completely fail to spot the manipulation in their own lives
Kids can be intensely cynical one minute and incredibly, dangerously gullible the next.
We should also teach them about risk assessment and just how bad people are at it. How we totally overestimate the risks involved in, say, visiting a place where there has recently been a tragic event which is unlikely to occur again; and how we underestimate the risks of running across the road without looking.
I put it to one group like this recently: when there's a 5 car pile up on the M5 and people get killed, you hear about it - always. It's news because someone got killed and because it is part of a running story about motorways being dreadful and dangerous places where people get killed. You don't hear about the hundreds of thousands of people who drive up and down motorways perfectly safely every day. That's not news. Because we hear about all the bad things and none of the 'not-bad' things we get the idea that the bad things happen a lot. They don't.
While we are at it, we really need to teach kids about the internet properly - how it really works and why when poiticians say they want to ban things online or control something, they really, really can't.
We need to teach them how to cope with depression and stress and that mental health is not shameful.
We need to teach about consent because some 15 year olds think that if someone doesn't say "No" then they have consented to whatever.
There are a lot of things that kids need to know that we are not currently teaching them because 1) they are not on the exam and 2) we think someone else must be doing it.
I am not saying that noone out there is teaching this stuff - I know I am (when the opportunity arises) - but our current curriculum is missing a co-ordinated approach to some really important issues and has been for some time. We are mistaken if we think that parents are consistently teaching their kids life-skills for the 21st century. Many parents lack these very skills themselves.
Click for BBC News article
I have no interest personally or professionally in what is in the PISA tests; they are at best an irrelavance as far as I am concerned, and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real business of education.
I do however completely agree that we need to teach our young people the skills to evaluate the information that they are bombarded with. And it's not something you can necessarily put into an exam.
We are bombarded with information which puports to be valid and true: the President of the United States of America tweets lies and then denies it. For Trump, and many like him, words have power but no weight - he uses words to influence the credible and then blames someone else for putting the misinformation into his hands. You have to admire the balls on the guy.
History departments do a great deal towards students' evaluative skills already. They teach students to question the type and validity of sources, but despite their good works I fear that learners do not transfer the skills to other subjects let alone to the "real world". They can tell me all about WW1 recruitment posters and how they were designed to manipulate young men into believing that war would be glorious and noble and then completely fail to spot the manipulation in their own lives
Kids can be intensely cynical one minute and incredibly, dangerously gullible the next.
We should also teach them about risk assessment and just how bad people are at it. How we totally overestimate the risks involved in, say, visiting a place where there has recently been a tragic event which is unlikely to occur again; and how we underestimate the risks of running across the road without looking.
I put it to one group like this recently: when there's a 5 car pile up on the M5 and people get killed, you hear about it - always. It's news because someone got killed and because it is part of a running story about motorways being dreadful and dangerous places where people get killed. You don't hear about the hundreds of thousands of people who drive up and down motorways perfectly safely every day. That's not news. Because we hear about all the bad things and none of the 'not-bad' things we get the idea that the bad things happen a lot. They don't.
While we are at it, we really need to teach kids about the internet properly - how it really works and why when poiticians say they want to ban things online or control something, they really, really can't.
We need to teach them how to cope with depression and stress and that mental health is not shameful.
We need to teach about consent because some 15 year olds think that if someone doesn't say "No" then they have consented to whatever.
There are a lot of things that kids need to know that we are not currently teaching them because 1) they are not on the exam and 2) we think someone else must be doing it.
I am not saying that noone out there is teaching this stuff - I know I am (when the opportunity arises) - but our current curriculum is missing a co-ordinated approach to some really important issues and has been for some time. We are mistaken if we think that parents are consistently teaching their kids life-skills for the 21st century. Many parents lack these very skills themselves.
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