Teachers, misinformation, and polarization

I have encountered another article from the NEA that has just been bothering me. Like another recent article, teachers are portraying themselves as the solution to a problem to which they are contributing. In this case, they discuss misinformation and partisan polarization.

Right off the bat, the provided a faulty explanation for why they need to become more active in discussing politics. After the lethal Unite the Right rally, Donald Trump claimed that there were fine people on both sides of the protest. A teacher felt obligated to clarify that Nazis are not fine people.

The problem with this is that not everyone at the rally was a Nazi. Saying that there were fine people does not mean that he viewed Nazis as fine people. This is just common sense, but Trump still had to clarify that he was not talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Even so, this teacher felt obligated to explain why Trump said something that he never said.

The teacher in this article had clearly fallen for liberal misinformation. The person who wrote the article also appears to have fallen for it. This raises a big question. How much do we want to rely on people who can't catch misinformation to teach children how to avoid falling victim to misinformation?

Like their article on radicalism, the article takes problems with both sides of the political spectrum and portrays the issue in a one-sided manner. The examples they provide are all against conservative misinformation. Okay, maybe that's not entirely true. As I already mentioned, they did bring up the claim that Trump called Nazis fine people. The difference is that they portrayed that piece of misinformation as fact.

Dishonesty is one of many areas in which the two parties overlap. Like teachers, I don't want people to become victims of conservative misinformation. Unlike teachers, I don't want them to become victims of liberal misinformation either.

This article even brought up the critical thinking cliché (a future topic). Products of the schools do not currently think well enough, so we need to continue teaching this type of thinking (that isn't really thinking) that schools claim to be teaching already. If we have a problem, I would much rather seek a solution than keep doing the same things.

The underlying argument behind the article is valid. Misinformation and political polarization have become very serious problems. As much as teachers don't want to hear this, their solution is too polarizing and too dishonest to fix anything. Students need to learn how to truly think for themselves, and they need an environment in which diverse viewpoints are tolerated.

I want to finish this post with a suggestion to the NEA. If you want to convince us that you are truly concerned with misinformation and political polarization, don't inject an obvious partisan lie into the very first paragraph.