Ignorance Isn't Strength: The Need for Secondary Education to Address Fake News

Abstract

The way people, and notably young people, are receiving information about the world has changed. Gone are the days of reading trusted print newspapers and in are the days of immediate accesses to information from a variety of sources shared virally through social media profiles and platforms. Students are living in a time period where the term “fake news” is continually mentioned throughout politics and mass media, yet their education rarely addresses these realistic concerns about how people are discovering and sharing information. Research has suggested the ways in which we believe students know how to use the internet due to their frequent usage of it is blatantly false. We need to provide opportunities to students to learn about and detect the ways in which information they come across on the internet can be false in order to ensure we are teaching appropriate 21st century life skills and to keep safe the role of democracy in society.