Johns Hopkins U. Offers Summer Class for Middle Schoolers on ‘Fake News’
“Without an objective distance from current events—and with ever subtler techniques for influencing opinions—how can we tell what is ‘fake news’?”
No one really needs a course to understand this. All you have to do is start watching cable news with some objectivity.
The College Fix reports:
Johns Hopkins offers summer class on ‘fake news’ for middle schoolers
The Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University is currently offering a summer class titled “Persuasion and Propaganda” that promises to teach junior high and high school students about “fake news.”
The class will explore contemporary forms of propaganda, such as “bot-generated tweets, mudslinging political ads, misleading advertisements, and fact-distorting TV news reports,” according to the course description.
“Without an objective distance from current events—and with ever subtler techniques for influencing opinions—how can we tell what is ‘fake news’?” it states.
The class is advertised for students in eighth through 12th grades and is labeled as “advanced.” It’s one of a number of high school courses offered through the private university as part of its On-Campus Summer Programs.
However, the course description did not define “fake news,” and the Center for Talented Youth did not respond to The Fix’s questions about the course and the term. The center initially responded to The Fix by promising that someone would follow up, but no one did to the initial email or a second request for comment.
The course promises to help students to “become critical media consumers while learning to identify flawed premises and developing rhetorical strategies necessary to question and dissect conflicting messages.”
Students will then “construct and deliver [their] own persuasive arguments in written compositions, oral presentations, brief films, and public speeches.”
The term “fake news” is used by people on the left and the right, sometimes to call out media bias and other times to describe “news they don’t like,” DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall told The Fix in a recent interview via email.
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Comments
I believe the class is not being offered this year. One of my kids did CTY, and it was fun at the camps away from “home base” JHU in Baltimore, but the class he took in Baltimore was weird.
It was “engineering” taught by an obvious non-engineer. And the kids had to be escorted every time they walked outside, even on campus, because it’s next to a part of Baltimore that was an unsafe slum already 15 years ago. (The other side of campus was still nice then. Wonder if it is today.)
Then he was supposed to get JHU college credit for the class, but they maneuvered so that he didn’t qualify for the credit when we asked for it. Turns out they had been denied by the engineering school at JHU to give credit for the class for years, but they continued to advertise it as college credit which is why we chose the class.
It’s a nice program with great kids and lots of great instructors. But the people running it were very weird, when we finally had to deal directly with them. Sort of like educational administrators everywhere in recent years.
In case anyone is reading all this, be careful with classes that purport to teach your school children “engineering”. Our other child took something called “engineering” at the high school, and it too was taught by a non-engineer. It was obvious to me, an engineer, that he’s not. And it turned out when we argued with him that he has a degree in “Engineering Techology”. A glorified 2 year degree spread out to 4 years so it’s a bachelor’s degree, where you don’t have to pass engineering physics.
This is also what tipped me off about the CTY class. We attended the final “suspension bridge competition” in which my kid’s team did very well, and the teacher was discussing the designs, and he described the thickness of a beam as “torque”. Not only was torque not the concept he needed for what he was saying, but no engineer would mistake thickness for torque. It’s like a cook confusing temperature with saltiness — two very distinct concepts.
And that explained to me various other moments our kid reported that had happened during the class.
Lots of kids want to learn engineering. It’s great to dive into it. Take a good physics class, or anything taught by engineers. The teacher should have a bachelor’s degree in engineering or physics, from an actual university. It’s a sin that frauds confuse kids and probably discourage some promising kids with bull…. to make them think they can’t understand, when it’s the instructor who can’t understand but they could.
Now CTY no longer advertises college credit for their “Intensive Studies” class in “Engineering”. I am the reason why. I uncovered that the engineering school was refusing to give credit for it.
I would treat this class with ten-foot-pole skepticism, solely given its origins. On the other hand, if they teach the kids how to identify fake news using source material about “gun safety” published by their own Bloomberg School of Public Health, I might be willing to endorse it.