Saturday, December 30, 2017
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP)
Alarmed by the proliferation of false content online, state lawmakers around the country are pushing schools to put more emphasis on teaching students how to tell fact from fiction.
Lawmakers in several states have introduced or passed bills calling on public school systems to do more to teach media literacy skills that they say are critical to democracy. The effort has been bipartisan but has received little attention despite successful legislation in Washington state, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Mexico.
Several more states are expected to consider such bills in the coming year, including Arizona, New York and Hawaii.
"I don't think it's a partisan issue to appreciate the importance of good information and the teaching of tools for navigating the information environment," said Hans Zeiger, a Republican state senator in Washington who co-sponsored a bill that passed in his state earlier this year. "There is such a thing as an objective source versus other kinds of sources, and that's an appropriate thing for schools to be teaching."
Advocates say the K-12 curriculum has not kept pace with rapid changes in technology. Studies show many children spend hours every day online but struggle to comprehend the content that comes at them.
For years, they have pushed schools to incorporate media literacy - including the ability to evaluate and analyze sources of information - into lesson plans in civics, language arts, science and other subjects.
Their efforts started getting traction after the 2016 presidential election, which highlighted how even many adults can be fooled by false and misleading content peddled by agenda-driven domestic and foreign sources.
"Five years ago, it was difficult to get people to understand what we were doing and what we wanted to see happen in education and the skills students needed to learn," said Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, executive director of the National Association for Media Literacy Education. "Now there is no question about the vitalness of this in classrooms."
A study published last year by Stanford University researchers also brought the issue into focus. It warned that students from middle school to college were "easily duped" and ill-equipped to use reason with online information.
The researchers warned that "democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish."