I can’t decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

New Jersey has passed a law requiring schools to teach media literacy to students, focused particularly on using critical thinking skills to assess news they get from social media.

New Jersey is fighting back against fake news stories online…

Moments ago, the state became the first to enact a law that will standardize media literacy lessons for students.@DashaBurns reports.

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The vast majority of young people consume their news via social media, and of those TikTok and Instagram are their primary sources. This, obviously, is a serious problem. Lots of both fake and very biased content are spread online, and as we all know TikTok and Instagram are sources for some very questionable stuff.

Schools, where students are a captive audience and the objective is to teach critical thinking skills, are the obvious place to address the problem of crappy information.

Unfortunately, we also know that schools are where lots of crappy information that comes from biased sources is spread.

Which gets me to my quandary: is the passage of this law a good thing, or a bad thing? Geez, I don’t know. It all depends upon the quality of the people teaching the classes, and the quality is going to be mixed.

We have public schools, or at the very least publicly-funded schools, in order to prepare students to be good and productive citizens. In the modern world an uneducated populace is anathema to a functioning economy, and in a Republic we need citizens to be able to think critically in order to participate in self-government.

Media literacy would seem to fit right into this mission. But…

• Public schools are run by the government, and will obviously promote the idea that government sources are especially trustworthy. Clearly, they are not. Even the MSM will repeat ad nauseam that one of the roles of a free press is to hold the government accountable because government won’t do that itself. So can we trust the government to fairly address this credibility problem?
• Public schools tend to be populated by politically charged teachers, and public education unions are undeniably Leftist. Does it make sense to empower political activists to be the authority on what is true and false in the infosphere?
• Mainstream news sources themselves have become hotbeds of political activism, and these will be the sources most likely to be designated as most reliable. Fox News is the only (kinda) mainstream politically conservative (mainly) news source, with all the rest becoming unapologetically Left-wing. Will students be encouraged to question these news sources as well? As we know, the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story was a purely political exercise, and every source disputing its authenticity would normally be considered “reliable.”

For these reasons and others we should be skeptical of the ability of schools to fairly and competently do this job.

But what alternative do we have? In today’s information saturated environment kids need to develop media literacy, and especially skepticism about what they find on social media. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sources are filled with crap ideas. Worse, cliques form where people can be led down rabbit holes and indoctrinated into some really weird stuff.

Of course, the main problem is that schools have been remarkably incapable of performing their most basic task–teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Failing that, it’s hard to see how we can entrust these higher level skills to the public schools. For decades we have known that the public schools are failing to help students meet basic metrics. Are we dumping yet one more task on the schools for which they are not equipped?

I am genuinely torn about the wisdom of this sort of class. The idea makes sense, but the devil will be in the details.