Educators must help to separate fact from opinion

Educators must help to separate fact from opinion

Simon Marcus Gower, Executive Principal, High/Scope Indonesia
School, Jakarta

Amongst all the problems and sufferings that Indonesia has had
to overcome in its recent history it may seem trivial to suggest
that Indonesia really needs to deal with its gossiping mentality
and love of rumor but in actuality gossip and the spreading of
rumors have been significant factors in creating problems and
prolonging suffering.

Social conflicts have often arisen out of little more than the
belief in malicious gossip. Political and economical welfare has
been negatively swayed by rumor mongers and religious tensions
have provoked and heightened by false beliefs that have no
relationship with the actual religious doctrines and faiths in
question.

Facts have then been lost in amongst a confusion of hearsay
and gossip and people have not been sufficiently well equipped
with powers of analysis and critical thought to pursue the facts
and not be misled by rumors.

Of course, it is quite natural for people to enter into
gossip. Human nature leads most people to enjoy hearing stories
about other people but there is a need to exercise powers of
critical thought to determine whether what is heard holds any
degree of truth. The warning "don't believe all that you read" is
widely accepted but perhaps it should be added that you should
also not believe all that you hear.

Often, though, it seems that people do believe what they read
and/ or hear and this can lead to disasters and unwarranted
conflicts. Obviously gossip and rumors can affect the way a
person feels about other people and issues of the day but facts
have to inform and guide people's feelings so that they do not
over react.

Recently there have been numerous examples where people's
feelings have overtaken them and irresponsible and irrational
actions have resulted. Suspected criminals have been tracked down
by frenzied vigilante groups that have acted on nothing more than
a rumor. These poor suspects have suffered beatings that have in
some instances resulted in death.

Evidently gangs taking the law into their own hands have to be
unacceptable but when their crime is added to by the fact that
they have acted upon rumor such behavior becomes totally
unacceptable. Such vigilante behavior cannot be condoned because
it has resulted in the deaths of innocent people. Falsely accused
people have been tried, convicted and brutally murdered on the
flimsy basis of rumors; a complete and quite sickening
miscarriage of justice.

Perhaps not so sickening but equally disturbing is the news
that university students have been engaged in inter-departmental
brawls; and these, again, have erupted on nothing more than
rumors. To have students from the same university, but different
schools of learning, attacking each other on grounds of petty and
most likely false items of gossip is disturbing indeed.

One would think university students above all others would be
able to think with some degree of objectivity to determine the
truth and so prevent false and foolhardy response, but evidently
some university students are easily lead by their emotions and
opinions formed on subjective feelings rather than objective
thought.

It is hard to overstate the importance of nurturing the
ability to patiently enter into objective thought in the context
of our modern world and the direction that the world economy is
going. Ours is an age of an enormous quantity of information and
those that succeed will be those that are best able to handle
this information and use it best for their own purposes. Leaders
are increasingly those people that are best able to manipulate
information and, in short, be opinion leaders.

This lays a very real challenge at the feet of educators, as
it is they more than anyone else that must guide future
generations towards skill in sorting through our world of
congested information. Education must increasingly be about
guiding students towards an appropriate degree of receptivity to
the world but simultaneously being able to use discretion and
filter what must be dealt with.

Effectively students need to be equipped with thinking skills
that allow them to discriminate and analyze material put before
them. They should be able to sort the relevant from the
irrelevant, the pertinent from the impertinent; the fact from the
opinion and the lie from the truth. In being able to handle
information in this way they should be able to integrate what
they see and hear into their own lives, making it meaningful and
placing it as a guide for their own actions.

There is a danger, though, that students will not be guided
towards this type of more sophisticated outlook on life, learning
and the world. There is a danger that students may too easily
passively consume information and so become permissive of other
people's manipulation of information.

Students' use of the Internet is a perfect example of this
kind of passive and uncritical acceptance of information. If
students are left to do their own research from the Internet,
they will easily and completely uncritically accept the
information they find. Indonesian high school students have been
observed quite blindly accepting data and information found on
the Internet. They make little or no effort to check or verify
what they find and so inevitably they run the risk of accepting
"bad information" or even "misinformation".

This can leave students learning wrongly and so be
disadvantaged in their education. Educators need to increase
students' ability to check and re-check on the quality of
information. This demands that students are able to think
critically so that they can base their understanding and
judgment on solid and sound knowledge.

Baudelaire, the French poet, proposed that "the free man is
able to see the reflection of his emotions." The nature of the
world today creates a condition in which a free man still needs
to see the reflection of his emotions but must also have the
ability to not be overwhelmed by his emotions. The manner in
which information is manipulated in this information age allows
for the manipulation of people's emotions that in turn can lead
to undesirable and divisive behavior borne out of gossip and
rumor.

The British writer Samuel Johnson saw the main objective of
education as creating people "expert in discernment in all things
with the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from
the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine." This
type of objective should be recognized and targeted today and
should be, as much as possible, realized in our students -- for
their tomorrows.

The opinions expressed above are personal.