Post-truth Incidence, Part 2: Post-truth in Education

We know how early experience and caregiver-child relationships influence the development of community-minded maturation. If we consider the effect that children’s books with no moral compass might have on children’s attitudes, then we might hypothesise that they might eradicate a sense of right and wrong from younger generations with relative ease.

Back in 2010, research by Sara Konrath with Edward O’Brien revealed that empathy, the backbone of compassionate moral behaviour, had decreased among US college students with levels of empathy 40 percent lower than their counterparts of the late 1970s. Konrath commented on the students of 2010 as “one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history”. O’Brien added that it was surprising that this “growing emphasis on the self was accompanied by a corresponding devaluation of others”.

Could contemporary books like the two above be accentuating this trend, and what effects will this have on teaching truth?Given what we know about Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (how people learn through a process of imitation), children are very likely to learn not just from the adults around them, but also from the books that they read. If these books present a subjective world view, one in which good and evil are not acknowledged, then these books will lead to a diluted sense of right and wrong as well as a lack of concern with objective, rather than subjective, reality. This can only strengthen the post-truth world.

Pre-defined Knowledge

The National Curriculum was created in 1989 under the Education Reform Act 1988 and revised in 2014 to create what Michael Young and Johan Muller have described as “knowledge-rich curriculum”. Once you are aware of Professor David Lambert’s view that “rich” knowledge promotes “an unchanging canon of facts, even though the rate of production continues to accelerate relentlessly”, and how this leads to what psychologist Dr Richard House refers to as “cultural stasis”, you might perceive the importance of a ‘Future 3’ model of education in which knowledge is viewed as fallible. Until such a model is accepted, education will be anchored in what Harvey has termed “status quo theory”, with the system reinforcing the prevailing ideological hegemony, rather than opening up humanistic “transitional spaces” in which genuine growth, change, transformation, and new thoughts can occur.

Audit Culture

The National Curriculum brought with it an audit culture, that, according to therapist Andrew Cooper, brought with it:

… a relentlessly superintended world, a quangoed regime of commissioners, inspectors, and regulators … [and] important questions of truth, meaning and authenticity are sacrificed on the altar of compulsive reassurance of the critical superintendent … Fundamental principles about freedom, autonomy, and citizenship are threatened by this state of affairs … Obsessional activity … is essentially about control rather than creativity … These systems may be contributing to a deterioration of standards, while maintaining a pretence that they are achieving the opposite.

Dr Richard House has sagely commented on the psychological effect of “audit-mindedness”,  a state that in his view “colonises the psyches of everyone in the system — including children and students”, for pupils and students have literally been “schooled” in a system that is preoccupied with, and dominated by, examinations, “high stakes” tests, and an associated and all-pervasive culture of “teaching to the test”.    

It is difficult to conceive of how such a culture could deliver a ‘Future 3’ education with deep roots into the questioning of status quo knowledge.

The Woke Agenda

In August 2023, a professor of sociology at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, Alexander Riley, described the creep of woke thinking in higher education, writing that: “Over the past several decades, institutions of higher education have been steadily adopting more and more ideas and practices destined … to transform them, the goal being greater diversity, inclusion and equity”. He leaves no doubt as to the grim consequences: “The view of the university as a site for radical moral and political propagandizing is getting stronger every day, steadily erasing the traditional view that the mission of higher education is the pursuit of objective truth”.

Examples? In October 2023, the American Anthropological Association and the Canadian Anthropology Society cancelled a panel on the importance of biological sex as a social and scientific category at its annual conference. On the other side of the pond, in the same month, the UK’s Secretary of State for science, innovation and technology, Michelle Donelan, told a party conference that the Government would protect scientific research “from the denial of biology”, claiming that scientists are being “told by university bureaucrats that they cannot ask legitimate research questions about biological sex”.

Given the extent to which biological sex is hardwired into all five senses, you might have expected the world of academe to rejoice. Instead, over 2,000 UK scientists signed an open letter denouncing Donelan’s comments on the basis that they “do not reflect the view of UK scientists”. They quoted the 0.5 percent of the population who do not identify with the sex registered at birth, referring to the 1.5 million people in the UK that combine Differences in Sex Development (DSD), intersex, non-binary, and trans characteristics, stating that the Government’s views would be to shut down research into the implications for these people in biomedical and sports science.

This letter ignores the fact that the totality of non-binary groups represents a minority when compared to the population as a whole, for whom the minister’s comments still stand. Notwithstanding this, a large element in UK academia are resistant to discussion of biological sex, even though it is strongly evidenced in the medical, psychological and biological, literatures. Are they captured in a post-truth academic world?

Dodgy Data

Post-truth is alive and well in some of the world’s top universities, fuelled by repeated instances of dodgy data. And some of the most senior academics have been implicated, including a recent former president of Stanford University, Dr Tessier Lavigne, who was caught not correcting errors in peer-reviewed journal papers.

Then, the oldest university in the US, Harvard, dating back to 1636, in second position to Oxford in the Times Higher Education league table, was in the university headlines when a senior professor, Francesca Gino, was accused of falsifying data in papers on her research on honesty! And, since her work was co-authored by academics from Northwestern, Duke, Southern California, Toronto University, and Harvard, these institutions have egg on their face too. The same also for the high-ranking journals that published the work (the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the journal Psychological Science) without questioning the data.

The rot at Harvard extends to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, as you can see in the table below: