Misinfoeducation

Everything we teach and everything we are taught by mass society has the potential to be wrong. A humbling thought, but one that is necessary, is that we’ve been brainwashed..

Oxford Dictionary states that brainwashing is “to force somebody to accept your ideas or beliefs, for example by repeating the same thing many times or by preventing the person from thinking clearly”

So have YOU been brainwashed?

I know I was, and many people in my generation and before me have the same experience.

Christopher Columbus

Growing up, we learned that Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. As an adventurer, Columbus was pretty top-notch in his day, with “discovering America”. He set out to prove a few things: that there was a shorter trade route to India, to destroy the monopoly Venice had on the spice trade, and that the world wasn’t flat (which is actually also not true because this was already discovered quite a bit before Columbus - thanks to a Greek Philosopher). We celebrated him as a hero. Every year we’d tell stories of his life, watch movies inspired by his stories, and sometimes we even had classroom parties as a celebration of his heroism.

Columbus wasn’t such a hero.

He didn’t discover America, he didn’t find the best trade routes, and he also engaged, and encouraged the MASS mistreatment of others - which is quite tamely putting it.

The first day he landed in the West Indies, he immediately enslaved different native individuals. Some state that Columbus did not want to mistreat others, but the records of brutality would indicate otherwise. The things this man did to other people are an absolute disqualifier from placing him with the title of “hero”

As an educator, you have a responsibility to ensure that what you teach your students is factual. This means you need to verify the information as legitimate before teaching it. While it can be so much easier to order a teaching book and educate from what is written on the pages, it puts the educator at a disconnect from the knowledge and can be harmfully impacting on the students.

For years we celebrated a terrible human being, likely all because the teachers did not do their own research into the man they were teaching to the students. This could have been avoided. The teachers had a responsibility to educate the students on the facts, and instead, they failed their students by lying to them (whether knowingly or not)

No matter how much we want to say that we will be different, how many of us actually are different when giving or sharing information? Do we check what we write? Do we do our own research, even on the information we get from people we deem credible?

Thanks to the internet, we’ve had access to incredible amounts of information, but in 2020 we had the greatest information drop of our lives. With the pandemic in full swing, primary historical texts were added to different collections and entire museums created walkthroughs of their displays.

There is no excuse for misinformation. None.

Check your information, do your research and stay up-to-date.

As we move forward into this zero-excuses mindset, keep yourself balanced. Don’t go and overdo everything just because there aren’t excuses. Let yourself rest!

Checking facts and putting in the extra work is going to serve you and your students longer than if you were to use material that is out of date or misleading. Don’t be afraid to update as you go either: that will provide students with a new experience of helping create knowledge.