We live in a time where we have a 24 hour news cycle. We are constantly bombarded with information. News has become a loose term meaning anything that will get ratings, clicks or views. I worry that the upcoming generation will not be able to tell news from entertainment. In a world where I have to tell my son to fact check everything he sees, I wonder how to teach him what true news is.
I have taught my kids, all three of them, to question everything. Told them to read both sides of a story and that the truth is somewhere in the middle. In a political climate where it seems the fringes are yelling the loudest, I have to wonder if the up and coming generation will even be able to tell what is real and what is a fabrication.
Fox news, MSNBC, CNN, The Blaze, they all have an agenda. It is almost impossible for someone to be completely objective. It’s the language used or the tone, even the images and lighting will change how we see a story. News is like a big game of telephone. I can see something live on one station and look at three others and see something different - but it’s all the same event.
In a world of sound bites and 140 character tweets, how do we as parents teach our kids to find out what really happened? Even being homeschoolers, our kids have inherited our biases. We all view the world through our own experience. We have people watching comedy news shows and getting tweets for news. Facebook news feeds give us an overview and we don’t bother to read the whole story before we share it and make our decisions.
I think that the only way to combat this is a continuing open dialogue with your kids about what is going on in the world. Teaching them to see both sides of a story. With our current political cycle let them read all the candidates views not just the ones you agree with. Teach them to do the hard work of researching a topic to find out all sides of any issue. Teach them to be informed in conversation, not to regurgitate sound bites. Teach them the importance of facts over feeling in the events happening in our world. This brand of critical thinking has become a lost art and I fear for the future if it is not taught to our kids.
Posted by
Heather Garcia
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