Some are adding new readings to their syllabi to address concepts like authoritarianism and populism. Others are actively encouraging students to engage in conversations about difficult topics, hoping they’ll be exposed to opinions different from their own along the way.
For Jason Blakely, a political science professor at Pepperdine University, the 2016 election proved that ideological principles like constitutionalism and democracy are less “nonnegotiable” than he had thought.
“We’ve been making this assumption for a very long time that you only need to study democratic values,” he told USA TODAY College. “I think that that is just not really a broad enough way to study American political thought anymore.”
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Oh, so far it's been highly educational, all right. It's much like Ronald Reagan, but without the brains.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm getting ready to teach a workshop on assessing sources for research and I'm kind of at a loss as to how to proceed when we've got people calling the New York Times and Washington Post "fake news." If nobody trusts anybody, how are you supposed to figure out what sources are reliable?
ReplyDeleteI think we will have to start teaching the standards for journalistic ethics so students have some tools to distinguish reliable news sources. In my case, I will need to study the standards myself first. There's a pretty clear dividing line between newspapers of record and purveyors of fake news. Probably instructive will be cases where the big newspapers have had their own scandals--and dealt with them. Janet Cooke at the Post and Jayson Blair at the Times are two good examples.
DeleteAnd, of course, there's discussion of data sources like the Statistical Abstract of the US, scholarly journals, CBO, CDC, etc. The fact that the scholarly community called out Andrew Wakefield's bogus article in The Lancet and have pointed out conflicts of interest in studies funded by big pharma shows that even fake articles that do make it to publication are subject to scrutiny by other researchers.
And, by the way, this looks like a good resource for news ethics: https://ethics.journalism.wisc.edu/
I would LOVE it if someone could suggest a relatively simple heuristic for discerning reliable news sources. The many attempts you see to label and categorize sources have laudable intents, but expecting anyone to rely on an outside authority to tell them what is and isn't reliable is the problem, not a solution.
DeleteMy mom, a journalist, suggests that sources that print retractions are reliable. I agree, but in the days of online media corrections and retractions aren't always easy to find.
My alternative approach is to discourage getting your news from places that print stories entitled "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant."
Didn't some years ago Scientific American do it by the typography? Notice that the page layout and fonts used in the Astrophysical Journal are quite a bit different from those used in the National Enquirer.
Deletemy class on the growth of fascism in the 1930s will be interesting..
ReplyDeletethis is a useful site. https://firstdraftnews.com/
ReplyDeleteI was caught by Blakely's statement: "We've been making this assumption for a very long time that you only need to study democratic values."
ReplyDeleteAs a freshman in college, I was rather astonished when I first heard that some of my classmates had taken a social-studies course in high school called "Problems of Democracy." What "problems"? It had never occurred to me on my own that democracy had problems, and certainly none of my social-studies courses had ever suggested such a thing. But democracy does have its problems, of course; it can be challenged and even overturned; and the only defense is to be able to recognize those challenges when they appear and have some idea of where they come from and how to counter them. Every high school in the country should be teaching a course like that, instead of the unexamined, red-white-and-blue version of political science, history, and economics that's the only thing most kids hear in school.
Back when I was taking senior social studies in high school in 1974-75, the state of Florida mandated specifically that we be taught why American Capitalism was better than Soviet Communism. Our teacher did a fine job of presenting what in college classes would be called "comparative political systems." He also taught us lots of 20th century history: how totalitarian governments love to rouse the rabble with common outsiders, appeals to the "common citizen," the "good old days," and "emergency measures," and how posters in Italy had the caption "Mussolini is never wrong" (although he did make the trains run on time). I've been getting a refresher course in all of these lately.
DeleteFrod, that teacher of yours was a prince among social-studies teachers. I remember seeing textbooks called "Comparative Political Systems" and "Comparative Economic Systems" in our junior social-studies classroom (Pennsylvania, 1970-71), which sounded very exciting, but for some reason we didn't use them. I wish we had. There are a million things I would have understood much earlier in life, and much more clearly, if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania could have been bothered to teach them to us when we were young and absorbent, so to speak.
DeleteWere those texts Common Core compliant? Somehow I really doubt it. I agree, though, that Frod's teacher sounds like the kind of great teacher that inspired me to get that BA in History all those years ago...
DeleteBoth Frod and I long predate the Common Core, but that kind of comparative course is exactly what should be IN a common-core social-studies curriculum. Then even red-state students might hear that (a) there's more than one workable political/economic system in the world, and (b) they all have their pros and cons.
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