Teaching students about authority of source?

Well once again I have been hit by a great conversation going on Dave
Warlick’s blog. His
recent post on teaching young students about the authority of source is a mind spinner. I don’t want to take away for the conversation on his blog, but this has raised a few issues in my mind that have been floating around upstairs for the last week or so. I just haven’t had the nerve or the time to write them down and float the ideas out there.

Those who know me well, would know that my Christian faith is very important to me. My world view is one of Christian Theism and given that I see the world through my personal faith in Jesus Christ all my opinions and thoughts come from that very underpinning of my life.
So….. what has this got to do with ed tech and this new information age? A question that I have asked myself for quite some time. And I think I am starting to see the link…. Bare with me here…..

In Dave’s post the question of teaching students to evaluate what is true has come up. Many folk have commented and given their own personal stories and how they feel we should be teaching students to think. As I look at these examples I am quickly realising that it all comes down to what is true and how do I see the world? This is an age old question but an even
more hard hitting question in this the age of overwhelming access to information. How can we expect young children to decide what is true and not true if we have a society that teaches us that truth is what ever you want it to be? Actually the very fact that I would suggest that this issue boils down to worldview and a need to have an understanding of worldview and or truth will turn people right off reading this blog. We live in a society that says don’t question any bodies opinion because they have the right to believe what they want.

My theory that I am going to throw out here is that without an understanding of absolute truth we can not expect anyone to honestly have the ability to accurately evaluate the truth or untruth of information. In fact we are heading into an age of complete access to all information and students today have an amazing amount of information available to them. Yes we need to teach the basic skills to work through the information, but what happens when we get to the heart questions of life and quickly get stuck on what we can and can’t believe?

Yes I realise the bleeding hearts out there would cry “separation of church and state” but if you have a real understanding of what that means you will quickly realise that it is impossible to separate church or worldview and state. If we don’t teach a set of solid values to students we teach humanism, which essentially is a worldview that says do what ever you feel is
right. If you are going to teach children in the information age that we are in and think that you can teach such deductive and deep philosophical skills without having a solid underpinning of values and how you see the world, I don’t see how it can work.

The debate on how we can get kids to understand what is true when there is so much information out there for them will ultimately fall back on our personal worldview and how we see the world. Yes we will teach some great basic skills to help with determining which source is correct and which is not but that is not a life long skill that can apply to everything. If the role
of education is to prepare children for life, then what life are we preparing them for when they have no set of values to base their worldview on.

Technology raises so many issues in schools these days, with everything from bullying on myspace to hacking a system. What is really starting to bother me, is that we as educators spend so much time talking about how we can educate the students to make sure that they don’t abuse the power given to them through technology, when it boils down to teaching young people what is right and wrong. If we have a world of no absolutes and more and more power and
access is given to young people then what hope have we got of things getting any better?

So go ahead and continue the conversation….. Am I off the track…. I don’t think so but the beauty of the age we live in is that folk can easily discuss and learn together.

technorati tags:brettmoller

Blogged with Flock