Critical thinking in a Post Truth era

By John Hellner

Teacher: On December 4 a man walked into a pizzeria in Washington DC saying he

wanted to investigate a claim that the Pizzeria was fronting a child sex ring run by
Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton. Instead, he opened fire with a gun,
probably believing he was doing the world a favour. What are some of the possible
issues in this news?

Student 1: Is it OK to take action when you believe something is illegal or immoral?

Teacher: Explain to the class how you extracted that from the situation?

Student 2: The issue might be if the original claim is true or not. Is it 'fake news'?

Student 3: And if it isn't true, does someone have the right to say anything they like,
even if it is fake?

Teacher: Let's take just one of those issues for the moment how can we know if
the story is true?

Student: We can check the source. We can look for evidence.

Teacher: How do we evaluate the reliability of the source? What makes for good
evidence in this situation?

Student: It was the Washington Post a famous newspaper. The evidence might be
some eye witnesses saw something, or maybe a document, or maybe one of the
children came forward.

Teacher: So, does this mean, you believe the claim about the sex ring, which
inspired the man to react?

Student: No, I don't think a presidential candidate would run a sex ring. It doesn't
make sense.

Teacher: Why not? Why would someone make such a claim about a candidate?

Teacher: Here's another claim made over the holiday period, some of the worlds
most prestigious and reputable news outlets carried the heart-warming story of a
Santa Claus actor who held a boy in his arms at the hospital before he died, offering
him comforting words in the spirit of the Christmas season. Can we believe this?

The 'Post-Truth' era

These two examples of 'fake news' spread and sometimes originating from social
media help create a world in which truth can elude us. Compounding the rise of
fake news, we seem to live in a world in which objective facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief the Oxford
Dictionarys definition of post truth, their 2016 word of the year, based on a spike in
its usage in the context of the US election and Britains EU referendum. Perhaps we
live in an age when it is more important for a thing to feel true, than to actually be
true. The Brexit leave and Trump presidential campaigns can provide many
examples.

The burden of uncovering truth

The digital world and social media present a bottomless range and amount of
information at our immediate access. It is the most efficient distribution network not
only for facts and verifiable information, but also for conspiracy theories, hatred,
lies, nonsense and subterfuge. Unfortunately, they leave the burden of determining
reliability to us.

Facebook recognizes a problem exists. After the 2016 American Presidential election,
in an effort to combat fake news and suspicious claims, Facebook
outsourced the work of reviewing questionable articles to five fact checking
organisations Snopes, PolitiFact, Factcheck.org, ABC News, and the Associated
Press and let them deliver a verdict about their veracity.

But Facebook can only assess a fraction of the accessible information.

Teenagers most vulnerable

A recent study by Stanford Graduate school of Education found young people are
particularly susceptible to fake news: the majority could not tell the difference
between fake news and real news.

Although they may possess the technical skills way beyond many of their adult
mentors, enabling them to access and manipulate the digital world, the study
suggests they lack the judgemental capacity to evaluate sources (e.g. middle school
students unable to tell the difference between an advertisement and a news story;
high school students taking at face value a cooked-up chart from the Minnesota Gun
Owners Political Action Committee; college students credulously accepting a .org
top-level domain name as if it were a Good Housekeeping seal.)

Critical thinking as a tool for evaluating public claims in a post-truth era

Part of the solution for our young people living in the post-truth era lay in guiding
their thinking to critical evaluate whatever they encounter, yet at the same time
keeping a focus on knowledge and the spirit of the subject framework.

One pathway could incorporate one or two topical discussion sessions of 20-25
minutes into the weekly teaching programme: not as a tack on to the main course
outcomes, but as a means to achieve course outcomes. Choosing a real life situation,
an interesting or relevant aspect of the subject content, news item or TV episode of
topical interest, teachers can examine the role of reason, emotion, evidence, bias
and much more in our decision making about claims barraging us daily.

This may be unrealistic and too intrusive into the time needed to deliver the core
competencies of the subject.

Alternatively, subject specialist teachers could capture opportunities to critically

consider current news pertinent to their subject areas, perhaps in the first or last
few minutes of class. On the one hand teachers would bring authenticity to the
subject and at the same time perhaps provide an opportunity to air thinking on a
claim the teacher personally finds intriguing.

Questions to foster critical thinking:

Any of these, or questions of your own can open a discussion asking students to
examine their own thinking about public claims:

What is the claim being made?

Do you believe the claim? Can you justify your decision? Why do you think the
way you think? How do you know what you know?
What source did you rely on most to lead you to your thinking?
Is there any bias or reason for making the claim? Is there bias in your thinking?
How could your conclusions or the facts being presented be flawed or
misleading?
What evidence is offered to support the claim? How or why might this
evidence be flawed?
How could we find out if the claim is true or not? What is the best we can do
to determine the truth of a claim within the confines of the classroom?
What further evidence could make the claim more trustworthy?
Can you offer another possible interpretation of the evidence?
 Does this claim make sense compared to what you already know?
Is this claim practical? Is it possible for this to happen?
What might be the perspective of another group, or from another time or
culture?
What does this whole situation tell us about the nature of evidence?

Critical thinking can provide the 'tools' for detecting truthiness, but not the will. This
comes from teacher modelling and repetition of the exercise.

This article appeared in Good Teacher magazine in Term 1 of 2017