Teaching Fact From Fiction

An advocate for news literacy sees these foundational skills embedded in all corners of the curriculum, an essential piece of a civics education for preserving democracy

Anyone working in public education today recognizes we are living in extraordinarily polarized times. Groups of citizens now operate in entirely different information ecosystems, and we struggle to come to an agreement on basic facts.

This discord has moved beyond the schoolhouse steps, whether the focus is COVID-19 mitigation practices, school and community reckoning on race or charges over the use of critical race theory.

As we navigate the most complex information landscape in human history, where information can be manipulated with the greatest ease and falsehoods spread online at lightning speed, a reprioritized civic education program must teach students how to critically think about information and how to tell fact from fiction. Without these fundamental skills, young people can’t fully participate in our democratic process. And without a fact-based objective truth, self-government itself is at risk.

The idea that public education must play a central role in sustaining our democratic system is older than the republic itself. Consider what our founding fathers stated on that point.

John Adams, in a 1785 letter archived at the Massachusetts Historical Society, wrote: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people … there should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it.” And even more to the point, Thomas Jefferson noted, in a letter published by the Princeton University Press, that the price of public education “is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

In other words, democracy cannot survive with a people uninformed — or worse, ill-informed.