Henry Lara-Steidel

This article applies the Educational Goods Framework (EGF) developed by Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift to educational interventions addressing the challenges of the post-truth era. The term ‘post-truth’ refers to a context where emotional appeals and personal beliefs overshadow objective facts in shaping public opinion and political debate. A related concept, truthiness, describes the appearance of truth without necessarily being true. The prevalence of disinformation and conspiracy theories, particularly on the Internet and social media, exemplifies this phenomenon. The article uses the EGF’s powerful conceptual tools to sketch out the phenomenon of truthiness and its relationship to schools and education. Following this, the article explores three educational interventions to build resilience against truthiness: (1) enhancing standard educational goods, (2) implementing information literacy programmes, and (3) addressing truthiness directly in the classroom through discussions on controversial topics, as proposed by Glenn Bezalel. The analysis uses the EGF to evaluate these interventions, highlighting that while educational goods can promote individual flourishing, resilience against truthiness is crucial for this flourishing to be realized. The conclusion discusses the implications of using the EGF to address truthiness, emphasizing the need for educational responses to the post-truth era.

The launch of the powerful generative AI tool ChatGPT in November 2022 sparked a wave of fear across higher education. The tool could seemingly be used to write essays and do other work without students putting in the effort expected of them. In this paper, Jamie Herman and Henry Lara-Steidel posit a way of addressing the concerns over ChatGPT and increasingly powerful generative AI tools in the classroom by first examining what exactly, if anything, widespread AI use undermines in education. That question, they argue, is logically prior to the question of what to do or how best to embrace new advances in AI technology. They propose that ChatGPT, rather than threatening student cognitive development and effort, reveals a serious flaw in higher education's current aims and assessments: they are directed at knowledge, not understanding. Herman and Lara-Steidel review the distinction between knowledge and understanding to argue that aiming for the latter requires work and effort from students, ensuring that they develop cognitive agency. They further note that assessments in higher education are typically geared toward measuring knowledge, not understanding, and suggest that this makes them particularly vulnerable to being undermined by AI use, while assessments of understanding do not. Although AI can enhance and aid students in developing understanding, it can neither provide them with understanding nor give the appearance of understanding without student effort. After addressing some salient objections, the authors conclude by outlining avenues for designing understanding-based assessments in higher education compatible with AI tools such as ChatGPT, and they provide a framework for both understanding and responding to generative AI use in education.

In more than half of its states, the USA has recently passed or proposed legislation to limit or ban public educational curricular reference to race, gender, sexuality, or other identity topics. The stated justifications for these legislative moves are myriad, but they share a foundational claim; namely, these topics are asserted to be politically and socially divisive such that they ought not to be included within state-controlled schools. In this paper, we consider the claims of divisiveness regarding these topics and explore whether, even if taken in good faith, the popular versions of these arguments and actions are epistemically defensible. We conclude that these bans are an epistemic injustice and therefore argue for their end. The article proceeds to consider the foundational claims of epistemic injustice, followed by the invocation of epistemic standards by which the arguments for these bans can be evaluated. The article then transitions to a close application of these standards, weighing the possible epistemic gains and losses. Before concluding, we consider objections and explore the social and epistemic significance of these issues.

At the time of writing, social media is rife with misinformation and disinformation, having very real effects on our political processes and on the vaccination efforts of the COVID pandemic. As the effort to pass new laws and regulations on social media companies gains momentum, concerns remain about how to balance free speech rights and even who, if anyone, should be the one to regulate social media. Drawing on Dewey’s conception of the public, I argue for the regulation of social media companies by the state as part of the effort to curb misinformation and disinformation.