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Geoff Johnson: Students need help with ‘alternative reality’

The overnight success of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is a sign of the times, and for educators, it is not necessarily an encouraging sign.

The overnight success of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House is a sign of the times, and for educators, it is not necessarily an encouraging sign.

If it provides nothing else of worth, Wolff’s book defines a huge emerging problem for educators — the widespread acceptance of the deterioration of truth in public discourse.

Is this a factual account of what goes on inside the home of the president of the United States?

It appears that it is not even that, according to the author, who casts significant doubt on the reliability of some of the specifics in the pages of his own book.

As reviewer Andrew Griffin wrote, the book is “ultimately, neither an intellectual criticism of Trumpism nor a political history of its rise. It is a gossip book, written for a president who generates more of it than any before, and who found fame through his gift for reality shows.”

Does that matter? Is Wolff just trolling a lawsuit that would lure Trump and the Trump administration into court?

Maybe, but Wolff’s book, it seems, is more about what we would like to believe, fodder for entertaining banter around the office coffee machine, rather than truth.

It is a sign of the times.

As musician, author and songwriter Mason Williams of Classical Gas fame wrote about a different story at a different time: “This is not a true tale, but who needs truth if it’s dull?”

As adults, we hope we have developed the ability to distinguish between important and irrefutable, empirically tested truth and “reality show” truth. Wolff’s book is entertainment and makes no pretence of being anything else.

We’ve learned to make that distinction, but, in all likelihood, our kids have not. Not yet, anyway.

So the task of educators in 2018, will be, apart from anything else, more and more about how kids learn to distinguish “spin,” “truthiness,” “fake news” and the “my facts are as good as your facts” rationalization of somebody’s subjective views of reality.

We’ve all been in school, public or independent, for at least part of our formative years.

We remember how innuendo and rumour ruled our social interactions with our peers; who liked whom, who was “in” and who was “out,” who told a lie and who found out, and who didn’t care — the kind of information to which our teachers and other adults had no access.

The kind of information that now leads the CNN daily news.

Somehow, the fringes of our childhood ways of thinking have become the latest sociological centre of collective thought, some kind of descent into a Jungian rabbit hole of blatant lies, deceits and misdemeanors that are accepted as the new norm.

And maybe for those of us who are children of the 1960s, it is partly our fault.

As Kurt Andersen wrote: “Thinking that swelled up in the ’60s [brought] a new rule written into mental operating systems: Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.”

So how, as educators, do we turn our 2018 kids back toward a place where they know to reject the harebrained, half-baked ideas and outright falsehoods that have become grist for the political mills, talk shows, “reality” TV — even the world of advertising?

A stated goal of education might have to be to teach kids, right across the grade and curricular spectrum, how to distinguish empirical reality from “alternative reality.”

Why? Because before the internet, creating any kind of “alternative reality” was long-term work involving knocking on doors or holding large-scale rallies that entertained an increasing, but still limited number of people who would willingly buy into whatever Orwellian “newspeak” was being promoted.

But now, even though newspeak rallies still happen, our kids live in an age where what is espoused on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube and Twitter has millions of instant users and followers.

Anyone with a computer and an internet connection has an unprecedented way to mobilize believers, and to recruit more.

Meanwhile, the professionally disciplined institutions, the “mainstream media,” are, for the most part, in danger of losing the information war.

That’s partly because reading a newspaper or magazine article requires the ability to concentrate for more than 10 seconds and beyond 140 characters.

And it is toward the ability to think and express defensible thought beyond 140 characters that education will, more and more, have to lead our kids.

Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.

gfjohnson4@shaw.ca