The Education Secretary, alarmed by rioting thugs, wants children to be taught in school how to ‘spot extremist content and fake news online’, according to reports this weekend. Well, good luck with that.
It’s not so much that Bridget Phillipson is trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. It’s that she is attempting to shut it after the horse has bolted, hijacked a rocket (one built by Elon Musk), flown to the moon, built an equine colony and conquered the universe.
One has to admire the optimism of a politician who puts her faith in the teachers of maths, English and IT to embed critical thinking into the curriculum, explaining to youngsters how to – as she put in in an interview with the Telegraph – “spot and dismiss extremist content”. Kids will be taught how to understand when statistics have been manipulated (a skill that might worry our politicians), distinguish a fake news story from a real one and spot wild conspiracy theories.
Maybe the nation’s five-year-olds will then be able to challenge the army of grown-ups who seem totally unable to understand that terrorists, such as Hamas, are not always totally reliable sources of information; or that bad faith players – the rulers of Russia, perhaps, or Iran – might perhaps be trying to spread misinformation here, there and everywhere.
Mummy and Daddy may not display their lack of critical thinking in the traditional way, ie looting armfuls of crocs and cosmetics from High Street stores, or shouting ugly slogans outside hotels where migrants are housed. They may well be law-abiding people – even themselves involved in teaching, in schools and universities – who are bafflingly unable to distinguish antisemitic conspiracy theories, wherever they are served up. But for us British Jews they are pretty worrying.
Of course, I agree with Phillipson’s noble aims. It’s just that she needs to look a lot further than the suggestions she’s made. Take the English GCSE syllabus for example. Are children still taught to write non fiction articles with no reference to actually discovering facts? I was rather shocked when trying to prepare my kids for the exams – and they were surprised when I kept asking them where the fact sheet was that they could use to write their articles.
And how about teaching British children how our political system works? Currently you have to wait patiently until late teenagehood for this, and not everyone gets there. A school library in every school would help too – no, unlike prisons, this is not compulsory. And time for children to read, discuss and debate – actually developing their critical thinking skills – well, I can dream.
Our culture now has an enormous problem with education. The narrow exam-focused school system has nothing to offer many children, and if you end up with few qualifications and an over-riding sense of failure then you’re quite likely to develop a grudge-fuelled liking for mad internet posts inviting you out for a jolly evening of pogrom and plunder.
But the academic successes who make it to university may well fall into the hands of academics who are keener on theory than facts, and are strangely allergic to critical thinking when applied to those ideas. And so then students believe that Israel is the wicked place their teachers tell them it is.
One of the lighter moments of the Paris Olympics came from the Australian break-dancer Rachael Gunn – aka Raygun – who seemed to be totally goofy and inept. But then someone unearthed her academic writing and it turned out that her goofy ineptness was very possibly done on purpose, created to make some wild point about her lack of credibility as a white woman in the break-dancing world. She didn’t want breaking to be ‘colonised’, so, it’s suggested, she made a mockery of the whole thing.
And thus Raygun is a metaphor for the current state of much of academia, where spinning around on your head and bouncing like a kangaroo in order to protest some vague objection to dead white men is more important than actually doing something properly and taking it seriously.
The cult of Raygun is everywhere nowadays. And so I’m not 100 per cent convinced that giving primary school kids classes in spotting misinformation is going to solve all the issues that are now on Bridget Phillipson’s plate. But I suppose it’s a start.
