Opinions

Critical thinking takes a holiday

Fact or fiction? Real or imagined?  This question has preoccupied the commentariat since the emergence of Donald Trump as a serious contender in the presidential sweepstakes. That Trump lies with a dogged persistence is not debatable. What is in play is what to do about it, for individuals, and collectively, for society, especially the news media.

There are two prevailing notions concerning lying for public consumption. The first, initially advanced by Adolph Hitler in his autobiographical Mein Kampf, argues that to be fully successful with a broad population a lie should be "colossal," so divorced from reality that people hearing it will think there must be something to it since no one would assert something so preposterous.

A corollary is the lie should be simple (a simple idea is easier to grasp than a complex one.) A second corollary, attributed originally to the psychological thinker William James, is that repetition works. Repeat something often enough and people will begin to believe it.

There is a modern corollary to this which stems from social media; it is that placing the lie in a context with other assertions that are actually true makes the lie more credible. The failure of major platforms such as Google and Facebook to label falsehood has contributed to this greatly.

And still another corollary, this one not new, but never so widely used until now: make news stories out of accusations. For months many stories purporting to be news have simply been reports of accusations, often with no analysis of sources, or no mention of sources at all, and with no statement that the story is unverified, or simply false.

[Campaign 2016: Facts, evidence and hard truth don't seem to matter]

Taken together, these mechanisms work well to distort truth, and they have worked wonders for Trump. The antidote, plain and simple, is to call a lie a lie.  At long last, some news services have begun to do that.

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But there is a larger story, in the long run, a more troubling one. We live now in a post-literate society. Tens of millions of Americans do not have the skills to distinguish between a true or false story on the internet.

A recent poll by the Stanford History Education Group of 7,800 students from middle school through college found 80 percent could not judge the credibility of a news story on social media. These people can only go with their experiential inclinations, or by what their friends initiate or reinforce, or, which has served many for a long time, the news source or commentator they have come to trust.

This is true across the political spectrum. Many become so convinced their particular guru is right they discount anything that contradicts or even challenges him, or her.  One result is dramatic distrust of science, and government.

[Post-factual America thrives in ignorance and ideology]

This represents a significant failure of education, and should serve as a directive to all working in education, especially in middle and secondary schools. Students need to leave school with a set of skills that will allow them to navigate the electronic world of information, so their approach is not immediate acceptance, but immediate evaluation, not of content, so much as of sources.

Public education has many faults. But destroying it with vouchers will only exacerbate this profound problem. Nationwide, students in charter schools have lower achievement and performance scores than students in regular public schools.

Clearly, increasing inequality in wealth distribution, and the acceleration of technical change, which has cost many middle-class jobs and threatens still more, helps to fuel the substantial distrust of government, and of elites in academia, science and the arts.

As Thomas Frank wrote in his "What's the Matter with Kansas" (2004), elites need to wise up, stop looking down their noses at the less advantaged, and devote their considerable talents and energies to resolving the disruptions brought by globalization. This is precisely the message Thomas Friedman of The New York Times brought in his millennium lecture in Anchorage in 2000.

But educators at all levels have a deep obligation to teach their charges there is a difference between fact and nonfact, between myth and reality. Young people's chances of a prosperous and healthy life depend on their understanding that.

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email to commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com

 
 

Steve Haycox

Steve Haycox is professor emeritus of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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