Reflections

Widespread misinformation and disinformation in society, accelerated by communications technology and social media, constitute an assault on truth itself. To prepare students to navigate this treacherous new terrain, schools can strive to build a culture of evidence. Students and citizens in a culture of evidence share a commitment to truth, are open to changing their minds, maintain a skeptical mindset, and ask for evidence for problematic claims. The simple act of asking ’how do we know?’ can become a habit, one that attends to the quality of sources and evidence and argumentation. Establishing truths—rather than transmitting them—produces a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of knowledge and how it is produced. If traditional schooling was focused upon transmitting masses of established truths, inquiry-based approaches reveal the hidden process of how those truths were established. Any field can benefit from incorporating more of its history into its contents. Students learn that a given domain of knowledge wasn’t always so clear, simple and self-evident, but was the product of conflict and confusion and research over time. This more robust understanding of the nature of knowledge would better prepare citizens for the shifting pronouncements from researchers and experts during the pandemic, for example. In addition, schooling should pay attention to what we don’t know and are trying to discover, rather than just what is known. Attention to ongoing research in most fields can unsettle the perception of knowledge as overly fixed and permanent

Argumentation theory · Disinformation · Epistemology · Mindset · Misinformation · Political science · Public relations · Skepticism · Social media · Sociology · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Golden Holocaust

  Robert N Proctor•Golden Holocaust•2012

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