Education for "Not Being Duped": Insights From John Dewey and Paulo Freire

• In Event: Paulo Freire as a Global Public Intellectual: Dialectics of the Global and the Local

Abstract

In the last three years, educators, media professionals, and politicians have focused renewed attention on the role of schools in helping students recognize misleading and false news stories. This rise of interest in fake news has emerged in the wake of the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign (during which overseas websites circulated fabricated stories) and the subsequent election of Donald Trump (who regularly tweets falsehoods even as he characterizes traditional media outlets as “fake news.”)
Amidst the rush of concern and calls for educators to act, less attention has been directed toward understanding the underlying social and pedagogic issues presented by “fake news.” What seems to matter most is not why or how information has been corrupted (or what this means), but rather that consumers of information are able to distinguish the “authentic” from the corrupt.
In this paper, I broaden the discussion of what it means for educators to engage “fake news” by examining how John Dewey and Paulo Freire addressed related issues in their own historical contexts. My primary jumping off point is Dewey’s 1922 article, “Education as Politics,” which analyzes how schools should respond to what Dewey terms the “propaganda regime” that grew up with the rise of mass media technology and the new industry of public relations in the wake of World War I. In language that seems to anticipate our current moment, Dewey describes living in an era of “bunk and hokum.” Yet, unlike most commenters today, Dewey understands the flow of false and misleading information as driven by particular class interests and enabled by failing educational practices. His central message is that “bunk and hokum” represents an epistemic and pedagogic crisis. Dewey’s vision for “education as politics” stretches beyond the narrow goal of helping students to distinguish fake from real, highlighting the need for young people to forge an active and empowered relationship to news and information.
Similarly, Paulo Freire examines the ways that dominant models of schooling are implicated in the spread of misinformation as well as the potential for education to play a transformative role. A central theme of Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the way that traditional models of teaching conceal reality and sustain the myths that hold hierarchy in place. Freire helps us understand how and why information about social and political life is distorted and how this process affects both the oppressor and the oppressed. Like Dewey, Freire envisions an alternative approach to education that, more than merely differentiating the true from the false, reconstructs how young people understand knowledge and their own epistemic power.
For both Dewey and Freire, “being duped” denotes something more than falling for a false news story. It means accepting knowledge claims with no attempt at analysis, with little or no realization that a claim has been advanced, and with no recognition that such claims emerge from an interconnected system of knowledge and power. I conclude that what is needed is for young people to forge an active and empowered relationship to news and information.

Author

• John S. Rogers, University of California - Los Angeles