A recent survey tells us that if, in 2018, 64% of Franco-Canadians had, most of the time, confidence in the majority of news reported to them, there are only 49% today. In Quebec ? “One in two Quebecers fears that information professionals will try to mislead them by deliberately spreading false news. »
The situation is made even worse by the blocking of Meta news and the fact that the majority of young people get their news daily on Facebook and Instagram. I recently proposed, smiling a little, to create a ministry of GAFAM. Maybe it’s time to seriously think about it…
Faced with these figures, and many others going in the same direction, the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec advocates media education, a work to which the Quebec Center for Media and Information Education is already dedicated. and the Science-Presse Agency.
Good news: this idea of media education is present in the new Culture and Quebec Citizenship course.
This one indeed gives it a nice place. From primary school, for example, students are invited to think “about the place of digital technology in their lives and in society”, to adopt a critical stance on information and to distinguish between “news media and social media, private companies and public organizations. This work continues in secondary school.
So much the better, because this is an essential element of the democratic conversation and the role that the citizen plays in it. Let me say a few words about what these courses might teach. Better, let’s go to a classroom…
What we could teach
The teacher knows well that trust is crucial here and that it must be defined well. She wisely concluded that one can (or not) have confidence in a person (one’s doctor, one’s mechanic, one’s neighbor, etc.) or an institution (an association, a ministry, a media) depending on whether two conditions are (or are not) jointly satisfied: this person or institution has the skills, abilities, knowledge necessary to do what it claims and must do; she does not want to deceive or cause harm.
This immediately suggests behaviors that she encourages her students to adopt, hoping that they will become second nature in their use of the media. Examples ?
Consult different sources, learn about each, use useful tools to do this (like Eureka.cc); know and distinguish the different types of media and what follows (here she talks to them about the famous propagandist model of Chomsky and Herman), and the different genres of texts or documents (visual or audio) which are produced: editorials, dissemination texts opinion — self-published or not —, columns and reports, among others. It makes them aware of cognitive biases and their sometimes distressing effects.
She also spoke to them about the effects that social media can have on each of us (including her, she was careful to say) given the time (immense and not always beneficial) we spend there. These effects concern our ability to concentrate, which they alter, the passivity they induce, the manipulation of emotions they exert, our physical health, which they harm, without forgetting everything they seek to sell us and the falsehoods they can make us swallow.
The teacher also insists, and brings to life in practice thanks to philosophy for children, the importance of dialogue and civic virtues, which must be embodied there: listening to others, knowing that we must live alongside people with who we disagree with, the importance of freedom of expression, of the art of nuance, in these times when so many things incite division.
The teacher knows well that the school where she does all this is a special place, a sanctuary. She takes great care not to indoctrinate her students and has thought long and hard about what it means to indoctrinate…. She is currently lamenting this teacher who is reported to have made his young Jewish students gather in a corner of the room, saying that it was so that they would know how the Palestinians feel.
She also knows that anything that happens outside the sanctuary dedicated to knowledge and reason where she works cannot enter it, and even less address children of any age. She is therefore delighted that secularism, established everywhere (let me dream a little…), comes to mark out and make her work possible.
It also happens, despite everything, that the outside world enters the sanctuary without it having the right to do so. The course must then be interrupted.
This was the case this week. Twice, when Jewish schools were shot at.
I am speechless…
Let me dream again. Through this school of which I gave a modest overview, we could perhaps not only train citizens who are more critical of the media and trust them when it is justified, but also capable of talking to each other and who would not imagine that we can shoot bullets at a school.
Doctor of philosophy, doctor of education and columnist, Normand Baillargeon has written, directed or translated and edited more than seventy works.