Students need to learn to search out truths

It was always the last thing, right at the end of those pesky Euclidean geometry “proofs” — QED. It meant “it has been proven” or “what needed to be demonstrated as truth has now been demonstrated.”

All very well to hold the opinion that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides just because Pythagoras said so and it was in a book. Euclidean geometry requires that you prove the truth of the statement through a logical series of acceptable facts.

This, of course, also assumes that we accept that 4x4 really does equal 16 and there is no challenge based on someone’s belief in “alternative facts” and that 4x4 could sometimes equal something else.

Mind you, there are several websites that provide a mathematical “proof” that 1+1=3.

That’s a mathematical trick, not reality, but there is a management paradigm called the Theory of Constraints that suggests that processes, including our own thinking processes, will be vulnerable because part of a proof or statement can damage or at least adversely affect the outcome.

No “truth” is unassailable now, and therein lies a problem facing educators. Kids (and even some adults) are vulnerable when they take it on trust that what is found on social media has to be true, simply because it says so right there on the screen. And because thousands of people have given it the “thumbs up.”

The problem is, social media has become a place for people of all ages to escape reality and create their own perfect world. It is an imaginary world that does not stand any test of logical, fact-based QED truth, but can still be broadcast to thousands, even millions around the globe.

So what role will public education be called upon to play amid all this sleight-of-word hocus-pocus and chicanery?

As enthusiastic consumers of an exponentially increasing amount of information on various social media, it is more important than ever that we teach kids how to apply some kind of QED process to test what they are seeing on social media and any kind of media, including the nightly news.

While it never has been necessary to teach how to distinguish between information and knowledge, between truth and misinformation, these QED skills are now likely to become a standard and essential component of all curricula.

So how do we help kids develop the the critical skills needed to extract essential knowledge, verify authenticity, separate fact from opinion and perceive reliable meaning and significance?

How do we teach how to analyze and authenticate information, assess its source and then to apply it usefully to a learning situation?

To complicate the situation even further, our kids are moving into a multimedia culture where every day, they witness pervasive and routine deception and untruthfulness that could not pass even the most basic QED test leading to a truth or a verifiable conclusion.

Bella DePaulo and Deborah A. Kashy of Texas A&M University’s psychology department suggest that the cultural attitude, at least in the U.S., toward barefaced lying is becoming increasingly relaxed because of the various forms of shameless lying that have become so widely publicized and increasingly common at so many levels.

They say lying has, through daily repetition even at the highest levels of the system, become accepted as part of everyday life.

What our kids are learning from all this is that the once-respected binary distinction between truth and falsehood, between honourable conduct and blatantly shameless behaviour, is becoming irretrievably blurred — and there is nothing really wrong with that because really important people do it, sometimes several times a day.

It is in this climate that truthseekers such as scientists and engineers are vilified when they suggest, as Julie Payette, scientist and Governor General of Canada, did last week that if we are seeking fact and reality to guide policy and decision-making, science is a safer place to look than horoscopes.

Educators, with some concern, have watched a tidal wave of technological resources, carrying with it the flotsam and jetsam of poorly formed thinking, swamp what was once understood as defensible and straightforward curriculum-based education.

QED — that tide cannot be turned back. The question now is whether all that tidal energy can power learning or drown it (and our culture) in halftruths and opinions devoid of substance, logic and reason.