ABSTRACT
Chapter 18 contrasts the sedimented habits and values embodied in school curriculum domains and the more or less rational and courteous ways of accessing, interrogating and verifying the knowledge that such domains embody, with the raucous free-for-all of social media, the ascendancy of ephemeral and anonymous online content over the verifiable and attributable knowledge of book and laboratory, the mischievous anarchy of fake news, the reduction of judgemental nuance to the binary ‘like’/’dislike’, the trolling and abuse that for many people have replaced discussion and debate; and the sense not so much that truth claims are open to question, as of course they always should be, as that for many in the public and political spheres truth is no longer a standard to which they feel morally obliged to aspire. The chapter then explores four pedagogical imperatives by way of response: language, voice, argument and, as both subset and goal of the latter, truth.
