I posted an entry on Friday (The Ethics of Anonymity), that I expected a lot more responses on than I did. Either, being Friday, people were too busy trying to end the week on a positive note, or my topic wasn’t as controversial as I’d thought.
I have facilitated a number of extended workshops in recent weeks, that erupted in (no wrong phrase — generated) some stimulating discussions about information and it’s authority. My suggestion (as stated in Friday’s blog) is that it is now the readers responsibility to determine the authority, validity, reliability — “truth” — of the information encountered, rather than relying solely on the source (book, publisher, library, classroom). In the information environment that most of us grew up in, there were gatekeepers for the information. They were publishers, librarians, teachers, preachers, etc. Today, because almost anyone can publish almost any thing, for almost any reason, to a global audience, we must figure out how to transfer the gate to the reader, and teach them to evaluate logically, the validity, reliability, and truth of the information they encounter.
This is hard for many of us to swallow, because so many of us work from a sense of authority. It is a core part of how we define our jobs. As a social studies teacher, I taught as the person who knew, passing my knowledge on to my students in a compelling way — some of the time.
years ago, there were not so many libraries, newspapers, magazines, electronic networks, or authorities. There were also not so many educated people. Those who were, learned a lot of silly things like Latin and Greek — so that they could wear labels of the educated. But they were also taught something that came out of a world where the validity, reliability, and authority of information could not so easily be assumed. They were taught logic! They were taught the rules of deduction and induction, the formulas of P and Q, how to establish premisses and attach them together to draw a conclusion.
We complain that people aren’t thinking any more, that they listen to the shrillest voice, and act on their fear. Maybe we’ve forgotten how to teach people to think.
Perhaps if we are moving into a world where authority is no longer to be assumed, but to be proven, then we need to go back and start teaching students what it takes to draw a logical conclusion — to prove!
There are lots of resources on the Net about Logic and Rhetoric, but you might start with
😉
Wikipedia: