Published 1-16-21, Times-Argus and Rutland-Herald
In this fraught historical moment of reckoning with the events of the past week, questions are raised about how it is that so many people have been convinced to buy into alternate realities of untruths. To cry “Don’t Tread on Me” when health experts tell us that wearing a mask will help prevent the spread of a deadly disease? To claim a rigged election despite the consensus of the Electoral College, virtually no evidence of election fraud, and the decisions of both Republican and Democratic judges in over 50 lawsuits? And what can possibly account for the adoption of such wacky conspiracy theories as a cabal of Democratic pedophiles operating in the basement of a Washington DC pizza parlor?
There is plenty of blame to go around, and no need to rehash the content that is so prevalent in our news media. Rather, I want to call upon all of us, educators and the public alike, to reflect upon how, despite a nationwide commitment to public education, so many people do not seem capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, or detecting when they are being manipulated into believing bizarre theories and holding fantastical worldviews.
The problem of malicious misinformation is not a new one, though the scale of it is unprecedented. In the 1930’s, recognizing the potential threats to democracy from a variety of sources – Nazism and Soviet Communism, as well as the manipulation of consumer behavior by advertising – and in the context of the explosion of new media (radio, film, newspapers, and eventually television), a group of historians, journalists, social scientists and others committed to critical thinking formed the Institute for Propaganda Analysis. The IPA did the public a great service by conveying the many clever ways in which information could be distorted to bring about desired ends and encourage people to hold opinions that were in stark opposition to their actual self-interest. Their educational materials were widely distributed to schools and colleges.
It’s worth noting the seven propaganda devices they identified as instrumental in shaping opinions. Maybe you will recognize some of them: Namecalling (using labels without evidence); the Bandwagon (claiming that “everybody thinks this way”); Glittering Generalities (swaying emotions though high sounding virtue words, like “Freedom” or “Patriot” or “Family”); Flag-waving (exploiting symbols that are recognized and respected); Plain Folks (in which the propagandist claims they are “just like us”); Testimonials (getting endorsements from well- known people, even those who don’t actually know anything about the issue); and Stacking the Cards (the selective use of facts or fallacies that support a position).
Propaganda is not partisan – it is a tool that groups of all persuasions can use. Right now, the right-wing insurrection is front and center and represents a watershed moment in the decline of our national political culture. But young people today swim in a sea of contradictory messages and media noise, engulfed in a hundred shades of truth and misinformation in online spaces with little or no curation. In the heat of the moment, we have turned to the giant social media conglomerates to be Guardians of the Fake News Gates. While I applaud their sudden conversion to integrity, I do not think we can depend on private information corporations with commitments to ever expanding profits to safeguard our democracy. What we need is an updated commitment to the analysis of propaganda. And the place to begin is in our homes and in our schools.
Critical media literacy has been around since at least the 1990’s, and is defined by proponents Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share as “an educational response that expands the notion of literacy to include different forms of mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies.” It is designed to teach young people to think critically about texts (writ broadly) and analyze the connections between media, information, power, and audiences. Unfortunately, in the United States, critical media literacy is hardly on the educational radar, and when it does occur it is often as an add-on or an afterthought. What if instead, critical media literacy was at the center of our curriculum in all subject matter? What if in math classes, young people were taught how the manipulation of math facts can lead to faulty inferences (in a graduate level statistics course, I recall being assigned the wonderful little book How to Lie with Statistics. It changed the way I studied the world). If in health classes, students were taught to look objectively at the information about timely issues like vaccines, and determine who was propagating what information and to what ends? If in science, they were helped to understand the economic and political interests behind climate denial “research?” If in social studies classes, they would study media representations of gender, social class, sexuality and race in order to better understand how biases about “others” are formed? And in English Language Arts, the study of argument, persuasion and propaganda could again assume a primary role (as in the 1940’s) in terms of developing a democratically inclined citizenry.
Students are likely to have urgent questions right now about how our government operates, about electoral processes, about the double standard evident in the treatment of a white mob invading the Capitol compared to that of Black Lives Matter activists, and about the conspiracy theories that are swirling around them, some of which they may be hearing from their families. Critical media literacy can help them develop the skills that are necessary to untangle the miasma of conflicting and misleading information and learn to participate in an informed way in a democracy. Vermont’s own philosopher John Dewey promoted the active role of citizens in the public sphere to debate, inquire into, and solve social problems. We cannot solve problems together if we don’t share a common baseline of facts, or norms of argumentation, or respect for differences of opinion. All of these dispositions need to be cultivated in young people; we cannot expect them to emerge on their own. As educators, we cannot shy away from our role in helping students “read the world,” discern fact from fiction, and cultivate their crap detectors as we seek to mend the torn fabric of our besieged democracy in these turbulent times.
Kathleen Kesson
Professor Emeritas of Teaching, Learning, and Leadership
LIU-Brooklyn
Kathleen has written extensively about the connections between democracy and education, and was the founding director of the John Dewey Project on Progressive Education at the University of Vermont (1997-2002).
