The Rand Corporation's provocative policy brief on “truth decay”—defined as the blurring of the “line between fact and fiction in American public life”—identifies four major sources of this degradation: Changes in how we get information, including the rise of social media and the 24-hour news cycle; cognitive biases such as the human tendency to “seek out information that confirms preexisting beliefs and reject information that challenges those beliefs”; the general polarization of contemporary politics and society; and “competing demands on the educational system.”
As a habitué of the education policy world, that last point got my attention. RAND president Michael Rich and political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh, the authors of the report, suggest that demands and constraints on K-12 schooling have “reduced the emphasis on civic education, media literacy, and critical thinking.” They add: “Without proper training, many students do not learn how to identify disinformation and misleading information, and are susceptible to disseminating it themselves.”
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