Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe. In an age when anyone can broadcast anything, we end up with almost nothing.
Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data.
OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)
Here's the thing: keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.
The right way to understand things is slowly. This is why I don't watch the TV news, I don't read mainstream news web sites.
I have two major sources of news: Le Monde (which I have daily) and The Economist (which is a weekly). Of those two I get the most information from The Economist because once a week I can read considered opinion and news not Breaking News which is irrelevant.
I also don't follow Twitter and I have a very limited set of RSS feeds. The only social news site I read is this one.
But if that's true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
Salon.com is pretty good too. If you subscribe they send you an email every morning with a link to one article and a short description. They might only publish three or four articles worth reading per week, but the quality of those articles is far better than anything you'll find in any newspaper. There are also almost never any factual errors, unlike the NYT. And also, unlike the NYT, it isn't full of blatant propaganda. (Ever notice how the Times always describes the warrantless wiretapping with the epithet "that begin after sept. 11th," even though their own reporting shows that claim to be false. [1])
I let my subscription to Salon.com lapse around 2002 when it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that they were happy to be a blatant mouthpiece for the left. It just wasn't worth the work to sort out the good pieces from the leftist nonsense. (Also note: I'm not any more a fan of right-wing nonsense.)
> keeping up with current events is wrong. Don't try to keep up.
To the contrary, keeping up with events online gives you the ability to be proactive about acquiring knowledge, rather than waiting for what makes it though the filter of a periodical or what someone else thinks important; not to mention the bias of opinion pieces. If your periodical of choice sits on a story, or misreports, you will likely never find out about it if you don't pay attention to outside sources (e.g. the NYT sat on their report about the administration's illegal domestic spying/warrantless wiretapping program until after the 2004 election).
The Economist is lousy. It's just current events. It won't give you the frameworks to understand what's going on, economically or politically. An Economist reader would not have known not to buy a house in the last three years, for example.
It's lousy, but not for the reasons you've listed. A good weekly magazine would be "just current events". But The Economist offers opinions, which are as misguided as those in other publications (such as Newsweek), despite the impressive-sounding diction.
This is a red herring. It's a pack of lies that you can't figure out who to believe.
It is the fatalistic, repugnant Fox News answer: "CNN was lying to you, the damn liberal media was lying to you, so now we throw up our hands and we lie to you from the other direction. We are Restoring The Balance. In fact, that's going to be our slogan. Fair And Balanced."
Buying into this is a recipe for disaster. Some people clearly don't believe it's important to inform their opinionated advocacy with data and events that occurred in the real world. And then some people do.
[Not to start a political discussion, for illustrative purposes only] The other day, my brother pointed out an article to me that showed that Obama took "oil company money", even though he ran an ad saying that he wasn't under the influence. It turned out the article said that Hillary took more oil money than Obama, and was also by oil company employees and their families, not their PACs. So I went to opensecrets.org to learn more about what percentage of the fundraising this "oil company money" was. It turns out it was something like $300K, in a campaign where Obama had $30 million cash on hand this month, not to mention the other tens of millions that had already been raised and spent. So the original expose (on factcheck maybe? I forget) veered dangerously close to mudslinging. [end]
The first thing you can do to find facts is start listening to people who ground their stories in data. Another good thing to do is to listen to people who criticize people by quoting them, by giving them a fair shake (Jon Stewart has made an industry out of just that). Listen to people who care about consistency. Listen to people who are forthcoming about their biases, such as affect their opinion. Listen to scientists.
Part of the problem of keeping up with current events is understanding who to believe
Come on, he claims that students can't name a single country that borders Israel, don't know which country Kabul is a capital of and their timing for WW-II is off by a decade...
Let me anticipate the obvious counterargument by acknowledging that anyone who wants to have a basic discussion of world events needs to know these facts, off the top of their head, because without them you can't reason logically about the news. But that brings us back to the original problem: Why would American kids want to have a discussion of world events? There is almost nothing in American journalism to inspire them. The published news in the U.S. is propagandistic, sensational, vapid, unenlightening, and often flat-out false -- and that's the New York Times and the Washington Post! The situation on CNN or (god help us) Fox is far, far worse.
Without any motivation to know the timeline of World War II, it becomes a piece of trivia: A random fact that is not especially useful. The ability to memorize trivia used to be considered a sign of intelligence; Google, Wikipedia and the iPhone are going to change that.
The advantage of facts in your head is that they can be mixed in with things you already know, provide context for new things you learn, and used to form new thoughts. While any given fact might be easy to retrieve from the internet, I can't use it until I ask for it. And I can't know in advance what the best facts to know are, so I try to put as much in my head as I can.
Well said. I think the best example of this would be the trivia geek; full of useless information, but almost always a well learned individual with wonderful ideas.
While keeping vast amounts of data in your head isn't worth it because of the internet, it is certainly still important to know this stuff off the top of your head.
The more that you keep in your head for later means that you have more information with which to provide a context for other information.
An example: I've been reading Noam Chomsky's book on the Balkans, and I remembered a few things he said. When I saw that Kosovo declared independence via the BBC I had a better understanding of how important that was. This type of stuff doesn't happen when you're sucking info from the internet on demand. When I see some news article, I don't lurk around Wikipedia for an hour researching it, I skip it.
FWIW, knowing is still important. The internet does not replace your brain. It replaces books (kinda).
Yes, I agree, but this is the argument that I tried to short-circuit.
How many freshmen in college are in the habit of listening to the BBC? How many have heard of Noam Chomsky in any context? How many have read so much as one book on history or politics, beyond high-school textbooks? Raise those numbers, and students will learn the trivia by themselves, just as your brain subconsciously learned trivia about the Balkans as a side effect of reading the Chomsky.
But the amount of trivia that students know is not, in itself, very important. Indeed, studies which show that "most students don't know where Kosovo is on a map!!!" can be dangerous because they misdiagnose the problem and lead to the wrong solution: Forcing students to memorize maps and regurgitate them on tests, a process which also convinces the students that geography teachers are sadists and geography is a torture device.
Learning starts before college. Parenting helps. I heard a noted essayist say once that more parents are more likely to know more about celebrity lives than to know their child's elementary school teachers.
What if you get the following item in your RSS reader:
"Dalai Lama Shows Support for Olympics" (NY Times)
How will you know the significance of this if you don't know who Dalai Lama is? And you would also need to know about the protests to know why his support is newsworthy.
This is on the right track, but once again we have the chicken-and-egg problem. You're using your knowledge of history and geography to sort through news feeds, trying to tease out which stories are meaningful. But students have little reason to practice that skill unless they believe that there is meaning to be teased out in the first place. And how are they to know that? It's all I can do to find a reason to read a news feed -- in fact, I don't do it. I get pointed to the most interesting news by reading the blogs of half a dozen news-junkie bloggers, who watch the papers and the TV and link to the articles that are actually significant... often placing them in a larger context at the same time. Otherwise, I ignore the news. I'm already depressed and fearful enough.
Those who haven't yet started reading news blogs, though, might find it hard to fall over them by accident. What they will find by accident is CNN and the like, and why should we be surprised when students think that CNN is a waste of time? It is a waste of time -- pseudo-scandals, celebrity gossip, mindless stenography, yammering talking heads, scare stories with blood, flames, and explosions...
Give the students a reason to believe that news is valuable and important -- perhaps by raising their political consciousness, as the author of the original article did -- and they'll learn the skills they need to find valuable and important news.
"Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data."
Right on target. My generation had 4 hours a week, for 2 school years, of what was called 'Philosophy', but was actually how to think logically, how to lie convincingly, how to identify falacies, how to parse a newspaper headline and articles, how not to be a fool in this world. Learning directly from the legacy of the masters of the past.
Two years after us, the Spanish government decided that reducing this "horrible" subject that "nobody cared about" to a mere 1 hour a week, and watered down, was a good idea.
They did so following a schooling model that was more flexible and nice with the students, and the "standard" in the most powerful economy in the western world.
9 years after that decision Spain has finally started to regret and revert their decision.
Very well said, but the teachers that take upon themselves to present subjects like 'Philosophy', are not to enthusiastic about it and the students may find it difficult to grasp the implications of 'Philosophy' in their lives.
Perhaps high schools and colleges should be a little less concerned with transmitting data and concentrate more on how to think, where to get data, and how to evaluate that data.
OTOH, maybe this is just another opportunity for those of us who would rather build something than spend time watching American Idol, facebooking, and partying. (Spending time on hacker news is OK.)