The Internet and Its Fallacies

Indulge me briefly in some irony: don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

Politics, parenting, scientific discoveries, sports... always check multiple competing sources. And teach your kids to do the same.

The only real antidote to idiocy is an open mind using facts as a filter. You'll notice I didn't say "truth." Facts and facts only.

Everyone is entitled to their own truths, be they about religion, politics, or which city has the better football team, just as everyone is entitled to their own opinions.

But no one - no one - is entitled to their own facts.

The roiling stew that is the Internet provides a marvelous place for a child to explore the limits of human knowledge. Like any other wide open space, however, it can be dangerous. I'm not referring to the sick bastards who prey on kids or the proliferation of pornographic websites - those are, perhaps, topic for future posts - but rather the competing truths one finds on countless blogs, vlogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, opinion-masquerading-as-news sites, and the voices of the many commentators who write with more authority than they actually possess.

Commentators like, well, me. But, again, that's a post for another day. Here's your grain of salt.

How children navigate these sites will in large part be determined by what they have learned from their parents. If all they read or hear are the words of far-left or far-right political commentators, their view of the world will be filtered through those words. They will come to accept, with little critical thought, that certain religions, corporations, countries, ethnicities, or politicians are motived by pure malice, that entire nations or faiths are determined to rule and/or destroy the rest of us. I recall with great sadness reading, about 10 years ago, an article in the Los Angeles Times about a Palestinian-funded school that taught its kindergarteners that Israel was "the enemy."

"And what do we do to the enemy?" their teacher asked.

With apparent joy, the children cried, "kill them!"

Of course, children don't need to go school to be influenced in this way. It's all their fingertips, from the comfort of home.

What can parents do? Teach their children to read any website with one question in mind: "what would prove the author wrong?" And then seek out whatever occurs to them. Granted, the elementary school set is unlikely to independently seek out The Huffington Post or listen to Rush Limbaugh. Older kids, however, would benefit from this exercise.

Schools make a big deal of teaching the critical thinking needed to perform well on papers and exams. Those skills, properly taught in the classroom and reinforced at home, can apply to the virtual world. Collecting facts is good. They filter opinions and enrich dialogue. But best of all, they help vaccinate against idiocy.