Teachers are on the front line in the war over truth.
Politicians and their corporate sponsors who unabashedly lie with impunity are ubiquitous. Citizens who believe or cynically dismiss the lies are alarmingly common. As a result, truth telling is now the essential citizen attitude and ability without which democracy, justice, and any semblance of equity are doomed. The nation desperately needs teachers to be leaders in a truth offensive.
Every day in every classroom, students offer explanations and claims. Some are true, while some are not. Teachers' critical follow-up response is, "How do you know that?" That applies whether it's a mathematics solution, an analysis of a historical event, a scientific explanation about how the natural world works, or an interpretation of a piece of literature. The essential expectation is that students' reply to, "How do you know that?” should feature relevant and sufficient evidence. Most important is helping students develop the disposition that truth matters.
“I just know it,” “It’s what I think,” “It’s my opinion?” “It’s what I read somewhere,” “You/He/She/They told me,” and “I saw it on Facebook, TV News, etc.” are all insufficient. Students can and should develop the habit of mind to search for reliable data, learn how to interpret that data to establish evidence to justify, reject, and revise conclusions. They need to develop the inclination and skills to do so across multiple disciplines. Unless that happens, we cannot hope to reverse the alarming dismissal of evidence in the public arena. This is job one for every teacher.
Beyond Trump’s ubiquitous lies about matters from the trivial to the momentous, the attack on using evidence to determine truth is everywhere. The assault is fueled by the dangerous–always self-serving–assertion that truth is personal, malleable, and instrumental. From there the attacks move to: Denying that global warming is responsible for the increased frequency of severe weather; dismissing of the effects of toxins in the air and water; rejecting the biological mechanisms of the evolution of life on earth; denigrating science as a process for determine what is true; using anecdotal or isolated experiences and stereotypes to condemn entire groups of people; and, most important, refusing to change thinking in the face of clearly contradictory evidence.
Teachers can influence students to either ignore or seek the truth. Engaging students in scientific inquiry, a fundamentally evidence-based practice, is a great place to start.
Students, because they are in the process of learning, routinely provide responses that do not match with reality, not just because of youthful inexperience but due to their deeply held, but erroneous, biases, and misconceptions.
For example, many students–and adults–think that material for plant growth comes from water and nutrients in the soil. That is not a surprising notion. After all, we hear about needing to put fertilizer or plant "food" in the soil. Nonetheless, only a minuscule percent of plant material comes from the ground. Virtually all of the mass of plant material comes from carbon dioxide in the air and from water. Students learn this in school but often do not retain this concept in the face of hard to undo preconceptions.
The repeated versions of the assertion, "No, you are wrong. The truth is …" are ineffective in reversing errant preconceptions. Cognitive and learning science research suggests that repeated direct juxtaposition of current conceptions and confounding evidence can change thinking in sustainable ways. However, effective science teachers are not satisfied with the repetition of correct answers. They require students to explain how they changed their thinking and the evidence to support new conceptions.
As it is in politics, so it is in science. Sometimes observers–all of whom have preconceptions–disagree with one another's explanation. The arbiter of scientific disagreement is marshaling convincing relevant and sufficient evidence. Not only that, scientific thinking leaves open the potential for new evidence to overturn, revise, or add additional confirmation of current knowledge.
Students can learn to answer, “How do you know when you are wrong?” For example, a teacher may ask, “What is the cause of warmer temperatures in the summer than the winter?” One student may assert that it has to do with a change in distance from the Sun during Earth’s orbit. Another claims that the cause is related to the tilt of Earth on its axis toward or away from the Sun at different times of the year in Earth’s orbit. A teacher could settle the dispute by providing the correct information but that won’t help students to know and remember how to know truth from misconception. That takes the teacher asking, “How can we investigate to find out who has the better explanation?” Follow-up questions include, “What evidence would prove each claim either true or false?” In other words, students learn to anticipate the evidence that confounds their own claims.
Teachers in every discipline can help students develop the habit of asking themselves four questions about their claims and explanations. What is my evidence? What preconceptions influence my thinking? What evidence challenges my ideas? Should I change what I think?
Imagine if more people applied those questions to everyday thinking about the political and social realms!
We all have a responsibility to teach children to tell the truth–especially by example. We have a moral duty to call out lies. However, teachers have a unique role: Teach students how to use evidence to determine how to tell the truth in what they say, and discern the truth in what they hear, see, and read.
Arthur H. Camins is a lifelong educator. He writes about education policy and social justice issues. He works part-time with curriculum developers at UC Berkeley as an assessment specialist. He retired recently as Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at Stevens Institute of Technology. He has taught and been an administrator in New York City, Massachusetts, and Louisville, Kentucky. The ideas expressed in this article are his alone.