Live Not in Nonsense
Hard academics and soft skills won't help students if they can't tell truth from fiction.
The World That Was
Back in the 20th century, when I was a young person, there were clearly defined and limited ways for me to learn about something:
Ask a grown-up
Read a book
Watch TV / listen to the radio
Go to the library
Information resided in certain brains and certain places, and you had to go to them to get it. Information existed inside a gated fortress and it was doled out at the discretion of the people who manned the gates. If you asked nicely, you could get what you wanted—or, at least, what they decided you needed. We trusted the experts to be smarter than us and to guard and dispense the information responsibly.
From our modern vantage point, we can see the drawbacks and limitations of this set-up. But it’s what we had, so we didn’t question it much. “What if I know more than the experts?” would have been thought of as a ridiculous question. “What if they’re lying to us?” was laughed at in polite society, although, after Vietnam and Watergate, the people asking that question started getting a little more respect.
Whether we trusted the experts or doubted their intentions, they were still the gatekeepers and the fortress was simply the Way Things Were.
And now? Where are we now?
Here?
That’s what it feels like.
Without gates and gatekeepers, it’s a free-for-fall. It’s not just that anyone can access information; anyone can produce information. The gatekeepers weren’t just guards; they were creators. They had their hands on the means of production, and anyone outside the gates who tried to produce something—a book, a magazine, a TV show…well, you could tell it was amateur hour, cranked out in someone’s basement. There was no way to create and disseminate information at the same level as the experts. It reeked of crazy.
That’s obviously not the case now. Everything looks professional; everything looks well-made. You can’t tell from surface clues whether the source of information is a well-educated and well-intentioned person, or a complete loon. It’s hard to know if you’re eating protein, candy, or poison.
To switch metaphors: if we adults are drowning in lies, trivia, and nonsense that’s posing as genuine information, imagine what it’s like to be a kid. How can we help our students develop the skills they need to steer their ship of self to a safe harbor in this crazy world? We’ve been talking a lot about “soft skills” in recent years, but keeping one’s head above the swirling waters of nonsense feels pretty hardcore to me.
The View From Here
“Doing your own research” is not a brand-new idea, and it’s not a disreputable one. Taking power from gate-keepers and deciding things for ourselves was a hallmark of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It’s not a coincidence that the the rise of ideas about democratic self-rule coincided with the rise of science as a serious discipline. If you knew how to read, you could learn things for yourself (thank you, printing press). If you subjected new ideas to careful testing, you could figure out what was true about the physical world (thank you, scientific method). Franklin and Jefferson were amateur scientists, among all the other things they were. It affected the way they thought about the world. Early American poets railed against the idea of Old World authority. We overthrew the idea of Divine Right for both kings and traditions. The power was in our hands, every day, to learn and discover and decide and act. Revolutions are born of such paradigm shifts. Ours was.
The Stakes
This book by Jonathan Rauch does a great job of tying the health of our democratic principles and culture to our ability to process information effectively and argue with each other productively. What he calls the “constitution of knowledge” is our system for synthesizing information collaboratively and turning disagreement into socially accepted truth. If we are constructing knowledge together as a society and taking democratic action based on that knowledge, it’s really important to keep lies and nonsense out of the system. A democracy can’t thrive in an ecosystem of lies. Good plants can’t grow in poisoned soil (yet another metaphor—sorry).
Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote an essay in 1974, while still in Soviet Union, called, “Live Not by Lies,” in which he talked about the challenges of survival and sanity in a world in which information was constantly withheld or distorted to control the populace. “The simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation,” he wrote, “lies right here: personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters: Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me.”
Vaclav Havel, trying to get through the same, post-Stalin malaise and misery in Communist Czechoslovakia, echoed Solzhenitsyn in his essay. “The Power of the Powerless,” and talked about the importance of “living in truth” refusing to participate in public lies.
These are Revolutions of One: not convincing a horde to storm the barricades, but making a barricade of your own mind—digging in and saying No.
This stuff matters. Once you know better, you can do better. Maybe you’re morally obligated to do better. But you have to know a lie is a lie in order to take that stand.
The Challenge
You can tell how powerful this all is when you see hard some people work to take the power away from you, or at least muddle and confuse you so much that you give up the effort and let someone else tell you what to think. Hannah Arendt had their number:
Unfortunately, it’s easy to “flood the zone with shit,” as Steve Bannon put it, and use confusion to push people’s outrage button to get an emotional, rather than a rational, response. Our brains are happy to downshift from critical thinking to instinctive, primal reaction. Reasoning is hard, and our lazy brains would rather not do it unless absolutely necessary. This book does a nice job of helping us understand the various ways in which our cognitive biases and shortcuts cause us to “know what isn’t so.”
But the power remains in our hands, whether we use it well or not. We remain responsible for the decisions and actions we take, even if we’re under the spell of liars and loons.
The Road Ahead
As educators, how can we help young people know better so that they can do better? By and large, our approach to instruction hasn’t changed much since I was in school, even though the information environment and our ability to know things has changed radically.
Think back to my four sources of information at the start of this post. How quaint! How ridiculous! Information is everywhere now. You don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to talk to anyone. You don’t even have to get out of bed. And if you don’t talk to a wise adult about what you’ve found, where you found it, and who produced it, you may end up walking around with some truly crazy ideas in your head.
This puts a huge amount of responsibility in the hands of children whose critical thinking skills are still being developed, and whose understanding of the world is still limited. When I was thirsty, I had to go to a designated place and ask for a cup of water. When today’s kids are thirsty, they stand in front of a firehose (sorry—I’ll stop now, I promise).
Here are four things we could work on with our students—especially our middle school and high school students—to help them navigate these treacherous waters:
Systems thinking. When we focus too much on discrete facts, everything ends up seeming of equal merit and importance. Each fact is a little rock, connected to nothing and meaning nothing beyond itself. That may make it easier to memorize things for a test, but it’s not useful learning—and it’s not a reflection of reality. The things of the world are deeply contextualized and connected and bound up in meaning. Events have causes and effects. History is made up of endless chains of causation—webs and networks, really, more than linear chains. Facts only matter to the extent that they help us understand larger systems. We need to help students see how information is connected. We need to help them build rich schema—big ideas and concepts that can hold the relevant information and connect the dots in meaningful ways. When you have schema like that, it’s easier to assess new information and decide whether it fits—whether it makes sense. As someone recently posted on social media: “Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.”
How can we do this? The Understanding by Design framework and Concept-Based Curriculum can help teachers create more contextualized units of instruction, where discrete information is structured to drive towards a larger understanding.Cognitive biases. As I mentioned earlier, our brains are lazy and take a variety of shortcuts to save on mental bandwidth. Sometimes the shortcuts are helpful (if they weren’t, we wouldn’t keep using them), but sometimes they’re dangerous. Sometimes they lead to things like stereotypes and racism. Being aware of how our minds work can help us catch ourselves when they’re not working well. These can be interesting things to learn about and engage with—especially if students can catch themselves and each other using them. Here’s a good resource from the Decision Lab.
Logical fallacies. Cognitive biases happen without our conscious intention. Logical fallacies are deliberate, bad-faith tricks used when making an argument. Teenagers can have endless fun hunting for examples of these techniques in advertisements, editorials, and speeches. Here’s a good resource from Purdue University
Credibility. If we are naturally inclined to seek out and privilege sources that agree with our position (and we are), and if authors use a variety of techniques, some slightly underhanded, to compel our assent (and they do), how can we help students assess the credibility of sources when they’re doing research? Here’s a handy resource, with a clever acronym, from the Robert F. Kennedy library. Acronyms are great—you could make a poster of it and have students practice the steps and compare results.
I know. It’s a lot. Here’s another option: just make use of this great, online course called, “Calling Bullshit,” assuming your school isn’t too squeamish about vocabulary. Or you could just use it yourself and then reframe it for your kids. The reading list alone is worth the visit.