Session Information
00 SES 08, Education and Research in a Post-Fact World: Responses, responsibilities and possibilities
EERA Session
Contribution
Historically, the goals of public education have been political and moral (Jacobsen & Rothstein, 2006). The purpose of education was to enable students to function as responsible, empathetic and respectful citizens who are able to exercise their rights and insist on a just society (Beckman & Cooper, 2004). In many countries, there is an explicit civics and citizenship curriculum that teaches students about democratic processes and the rights and responsibilities of citizens and the processes of government. These goals have changed over time. Citing an economic rationale, the OECD contends that in the ‘knowledge economy’, educated students need to be able to critically evaluate what they read, and that ‘[e]ducated workers need a conceptual understanding of complex concepts, and the ability to work with them creatively to generate new ideas, new theories, new products, and new knowledge’ (CERI, 2008, p. 1). More recently, scientific literacy and information literacy have been proposed as important aspects of curriculum to ensure that citizens develop the ability to understand the opinions of experts and the policies of governments, and to participate in significant public debates to influence policy. Globalisation and its impacts have further shaped education purposes, policies and practices. Recent global events such as Brexit and the Trump campaigns have brought into the space of public debate such phenomena as ‘fake news’ and the ‘post-truth world’. They have brought in their wake the rise of fundamentalism and ‘alt-right’ movements and an apparent disregard for the truth. These developments strike at the heart of democracy itself. How is education to adapt its purposes, policies and practices to these new and terrifying phenomena? Reshaping the curriculum and reclaiming and reinforcing the moral and political purposes of education at both the school level and in higher education have now become an urgent imperative. This paper examines the challenges posed to the purposes, policies and practices of education in the post-fact world, focusing particularly on research and critique in the post-truth age. Institutions of higher education and research are directly concerned with truth and knowledge making. Using concepts from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this presentation will explore the features of the ‘post-truth world’ and how it differs from conventional practices of fact-making and validation. It will examine the challenges posed by the new developments and the post-truth age to the political, moral, cultural and intellectual purposes of education and research.
References
Gold, J. (2016, 6 December 2016). Teaching in the Post-Truth Era. Student Voice. Peters, M. A. (2017). Education in a Post-Truth World. Educational Philosophy and Theory(On-line). doi: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1264114 Seargeant, P. (2016, 12 January, 2017). Fake News: the solution is education, not regulation. Times Higher Education. Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Stanford: Stanford University.
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