Learning To Learn — The Existential Fake News Crisis

School is a pretty straightforward affair. You go to class, the teacher tells you some things, you take notes, study those notes, and later you’re evaluated on how much you remember. I recall my first AP experience being a grand departure from this formula. So much so, that I actually wasn’t certain how to approach this class.

On the very first day of class, I wasn’t met with an introduction to the teacher, subject matter, or greeted with a syllabus. We had a quiz. Not a quiz to evaluate how much of the course material we already knew, either. This was a weighted, graded quiz. This was going to affect my grade. My initial reaction was outrage. How in the world were we supposed to have a quiz on European history without having been taught anything? But then I remembered receiving a syllabus at orientation before the school year started. We were supposed to have read the first chapter of the textbook.

This is the narrative that went on to shape my future AP and college experiences, but after the initial shock of it, I was actually quite pleased with this system. The purpose of school was no longer to inform, something access to the internet had made obsolete, but to empower our information gathering skills and verify that we had acquired and interpreted the information correctly. Perhaps this is the reason we make the distinction between “teacher” and “professor”.

Whereas the majority of my secondary education supplied teachers to ensure I was learning the basic building blocks of various topics, college (seemingly arbitrarily) designated the title professor to my new instructors. This may have something to do with their distinction in education and degree; however, it’s possible it is fundamental to the etymology behind the two words.

A teacher has the job of showing, presenting or pointing out. This seems to indicate they are revealing information to students.

Conversely, professors carry the weight of declaring publicly.

Maybe I’m mincing words and a bit drunk on a Steven Pinker binge, but for the sake of argument, let’s pretend there is a greater gravity to the diction than gut reaction reveals. A professor is tasked with assigning students material to study privately and later ‘publicly declare’ the meaning of the exercise. I’ll admit the distinction is slight; however, this differs from the role of a teacher, which is to be the primary source of information, rather than a mere corroborator.

Why in the hell does any of this matter and why am I writing about it now?

2016 was the year “fake news” became a new buzz phrase representing a misinformed public. Although I can’t completely credit post secondary education with the ability to learn, it is widely accepted that the undereducated are fodder for fake news fires. This doesn’t completely explain away the issue; leading publications were fueled by the fake news scare in 2016.

But how do you know what to believe? Have we been looking to the media as teachers or professors? The media simply publicly declares their findings, but how should we react when their findings do not corroborate our own? Do we have other findings besides what we’ve read in the news?

It may be time to take a fundamentally different approach to how we acquire information. For those of us who skated through research papers on the strength of Wikipedia, for those of us who read 30 minute think pieces in The Atlantic, for those of us who simply purchased essays from unemployed professors — we are facing an existential crisis. The manner in which we acquire information is being challenged, au fond, and we are at a complete loss of how to recover. Narratives from either party echo the proverbial boy who cried wolf and are eerily reminiscent of the WMDs mantra that characterized the early 2000s.

I certainly wish I was able to offer more than questions. Unfortunately, this thinkpiece is just me coming to terms with the fact that my entire existence is fabricated by the information I choose to believe. Lacking empirical evidence for so many of the systems, be they financial or political, that govern my well being, I am simply left with a plethora of words, but a loss for solutions.

If information is currency, it appears social media has been an experiment in credit completely lacking in credibility.