Sam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness argues that K-12 students need to be equipped with the ability to analyze media and spot misinformation. This crucial skill, which helps them become informed participants in democracy and resist demagogues, is not actually widely taught. Shain explains how he teaches his students critical thinking, including playing “spot the fallacy” with Ben Shapiro videos and having students write their own piece of “fake news.” In our conversation, we talk about why it’s important to bring politics into the classroom and how to make sure kids hear dissenting perspectives without trying to indoctrinate them. Shain also recounts his own disturbing experience being forced out of a job after a complaint from a Trump-supporting parent.
Robinson
Your book is about how we’re going to create a generation of young people who know how to avoid bullshit and lies, and who are capable of thinking for themselves.
You’re writing about media literacy, which is interesting because it is not one of the subjects that is listed on the standard high school curriculum. I took English, History, and Chemistry—I don’t remember “media literacy” being offered. Could tell us why this is such a particularly critical subject?
Shain
Since I got into teaching, I always found it really unbelievable that people sat down and wrote out everything a high school kid would need to know, somewhat of an impossible task. But then in doing so, they also don’t have anything about media literacy or critical thinking. Here in Maine, for example, you don’t have to reference slavery. You’re never going to account for every single thing that a kid needs to learn. You’re never going to do that to begin with, and that is made clear when these crucial things, like media literacy and critical thinking, are nowhere to be found in the standards.
Robinson
I take what you’re saying is we can only teach kids a limited amount of stuff, and don’t have time to teach them all the history that is important. You’re always teaching them a small and selective sliver because you can only teach them so much. You definitely have to teach them how to think and analyze information so that when you release them off into the world, they know how to learn on their own.
Shain
Absolutely. There’s a Twitter bot that shows the top 10 most viewed or shared articles on Facebook, and it’s awful. It’s always Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire.
Robinson
Dan Bongino.
Shain
Yes, he’s always up there. Clearly there’s something going on with both public consciousness, in what appeals to them, but also something with the algorithms. These things are obviously getting more help than they should from the algorithm while sources like Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Intercept, and all these other sources are not getting boosted. When you have a world full of all of that nonsense, I think public schools have a duty to offer a different way of looking at things or even a different political perspective. All these kids are online all the time, and that’s the thing that they’re going to run into. If not right now, then eventually.
Robinson
Yes, as much as I wish the algorithm was heavily pushing Current Affairs articles, we have not seen evidence of that. In fact, we see evidence somewhat of the opposite, which is that if you follow Current Affairs on Facebook, there’s no guarantee that it’s actually going to put our articles in your newsfeed, even if you’ve asked to follow us.
So, what you’re saying is we have to equip kids because they will be deluged with lies and propaganda. A vital service that the public school system has to perform is propaganda analysis and learning how to dissect information.
Shain
Yes, absolutely. And I don’t want to just pick on some of those fringe type guys—I guess they’re not fringe, but these talking heads. I do a unit on corporate media itself as well, because we see what they do all the time to things like the Bernie Sanders candidacy and ideas like Medicare For All. We see how they discuss the issues, and there is a whole way of thinking about things that is completely obscured on these different media outlets. So, even offering that perspective, and just pointing out to them how things are done in Finland and Norway, and asking, “Have you heard about France’s healthcare program?” explaining to them that this narrow segment that you see peddled out there by these—let’s be real—right-wing sources, is not the only game in town. These issues they talk about are very narrow compared to everything out there.
Robinson
Yes, it seems to me that you make the case for doing two different but related kinds of things in teaching. One, as I’ve mentioned and want to go into more deeply, is teaching how to think and analyze the information you receive, but you also make the case that teachers should not shy away from politics. Many things that might be considered “bringing politics into the classroom” are pointing out crucial facts that are left out of mainstream discourse. You will be accused of, by the right, of pushing leftist propaganda, but you say those things that are treated as “pushing leftist propaganda” are actually often just giving students vital, factual information that they are not otherwise going to get.
Shain
Absolutely. If it’s a real thing that Norway really does have a healthcare system where you pay no more than $200 out of pocket, why can’t we talk about that in a school system? The problem with the whole “you’re pushing a narrative by pointing this out,” is I feel like people on the left are conscious of what they believe in and more honest about it, where people who espouse right-wing ideas sometimes don’t even know they’re doing it.
I’ll give you an example. I had an administrator a few years ago come into one of my classes during the time when Biden was trying to pass the Build Back Better bill, having to do with infrastructure and things like that. The way he framed it to my class, completely uninvited, was, “Do you want the government to take control of your life?” We were reading Fahrenheit 451, and he was somehow relating that book to his idea that spending money on infrastructure was going to mean full government control. That is completely his idea. But in his mind, I have to believe he just thought he was offering an interesting perspective, an objective one at that. We’re sitting in a public school, for God’s sake. Does that mean that people are under control because they have this public service?
It’s wild to see that sort of thing. I think that because we’re aware and honest, we get accused of “doing politics”, but the fact is, so many things are political. You might as well know about it than just float through life, not really realizing how these political forces are acting on you.
Robinson
Because we live in what is, in theory, a democracy, every person is expected and has some power to participate in politics. Every child in your classroom will be asked to vote in elections and people will be asking for their vote. If you leave politics out and avoid the discussion of all the issues that they will be called upon to make decisions about through the use of their vote, you are essentially leaving them very ill-equipped to exercise the power that will be bestowed upon them the moment they turn 18.
Shain
Absolutely, if you leave them just at the whim of whatever Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, Fox News, or even MSNBC and CNN are saying, that’s simply not going to be in their best interest. I think we know this already. And, furthermore, let’s be honest here, a lot more of my students, and most students around the country, are going to end up being workers and selling their labor. They’re not going to end up opening an extremely successful, gigantic business. Most of these kids will have interests that align with 98% of other people.
Robinson
How do you strike a balance between telling things as you see it, and also encouraging students to think critically and not accept anything just because you said it? If you give your take on capitalism, for instance, and if it becomes clear that you think certain things are exploitative and wrong, how do you make sure that if students then go along with you they’re doing so because they are persuaded, rather than because they are deferring to you or your authority?
Shain
When I do give my take on things, I usually accompany it with a “Mr. Shain opinion alert,” and give my opinion. This does not happen all the time, I will say. I usually just like to say we could either continue to run healthcare the way we do, or we could consider taking out the middleman of gigantic insurance companies, you decide. What would you rather do? It sounds crazy to us, I feel like, but if you get down into it, as we all know, we have this cumbersome middleman that’s extremely expensive. There’s that quote from Obama, when he just comes out and says it: what are we going to do with all the people who work in insurance if we go ahead and eliminate this middleman?
If you throw both of those things out there, I don’t really even need to say which one I think is logical. If you get both points of view, unlike what you would get listening to Shapiro or somebody, then it’s a no-brainer, unless you’re so dogmatic about it and think business is so important and would rather just pay more for health insurance than these other countries who have somehow figured it out.
Robinson
What I like about the approach you take in the book is, essentially, you don’t need to “indoctrinate” kids with leftist ideology. All you need to do is teach them critical thinking, and if you do that, many of them are going to arrive at conclusions that we might consider leftist. You teach them, for example, when someone tells them something, how to check whether it’s true. And then, when they are set forth in the world to analyze Ben Shapiro videos, they will pretty quickly realize that he is full of shit.
Shain
Yes, he’s the fallacy king. I use a Shapiro video when we look at critical thinking. This is a man who’s built his career off supposedly being this “facts don’t care about your feelings” guy. I show the one where Andrew Neil just completely owns him, and then Shapiro claims Neil is a leftist when really he’s a staunch conservative. There’s fallacy after fallacy in that video alone, coming from a guy who has built a career out of supposedly being this guy that just calls balls and strikes, and things like that. And when you teach those critical thinking models, and play that video, and ask, “Where did we see these fallacies?” and they can point them out themselves, that is a huge step in the right direction when it comes to seeing through the sort of dishonesty that we see from guys like that.
Robinson
Could you tell us some of the exercises that you’ve developed to help teach these kinds of critical thinking skills?
Shain
Today, in my journalism class, we started looking at that Ad Fontes media bias chart. You’ve probably seen that.
Robinson
Yes, where many different media organizations are listed on the spectrum of their supposed biases.
Shain
Right. You show that to the kids, and they at first say what a helpful tool it is. The chart ranks Fox News, for example, as less fact-based than CNN or MSNBC, and the students say “This would make certain people mad.” And I say, “Do you want to take a closer look at this? What do you guys think about this?” I ask them probing questions until they figure out to ask a very important question about that chart: Who decided where all of these sources went? Who plotted all these sources? By the end of class today, my kids were just so intrigued.
The Ad Fontes methodology is they have three people from the so-called left, right, and center read a handful of articles, and then decide where it goes on the chart. By the end of class, my students were very much wanting to know about the guy in the center. Where did he go to school? What kind of upbringing does he have? How much does he make in a year? They noticed he was an older man—what kind of life did he have growing up? How much was college when he was coming up through? Is he a homeowner? What makes this guy “center,” and what makes the center so important? And they started to realize just how important this guy was in plotting all of those sources onto the chart.
By the end of it, I tried to caution them by saying, “At least they took a stab at this.” This is a very difficult task that some would say is not even worth trying to do. I read a great Columbia Journalism Review article on that question: why bother even doing this? Balancing it, I just said maybe it’s a fine thing to reference, but don’t believe for one second this is an “objective” thing. We’re in the middle of the bias unit, and I point out that there’s bias all the time. And again, these guys who say, “I’m just calling balls and strikes” and “I’m just calling it like I see it” and all this other nonsense, it’s simply not true.
I was extremely encouraged, for example, when the kids started to wonder, “What does the guy in the center really believe in? What does the center even mean on this chart?” We try to tie that into how that was the appeal of Biden, for example. We heard that in the news: he’s the center guy, so we got to go with this guy. This whole concept of center and what that even means is a wonderful discussion to have when we’re exploring bias. That’s just an example of what I did today.
Robinson
Yes, you talk about how you use these key media literacy questions:
- Who created the message?
- What are the techniques being used to attract my attention?
- How might different people understand the message differently?
- What values and points of view are represented in the message?
- Why is the message being sent?
It is great that you apply it to the media bias chart itself because the typical way might be to use these to analyze the media organizations. But you’re asking who created the chart and the rankings. What “units” are these supposedly quantitative measurements in? How is this judgment being reached? You’re showing the students how to spot the most insidious kind of bias, which is the bias that is held by those who insist that they are only giving you absolute objective truth—which, of course, is what Ben Shapiro himself insists upon.
Shain
Exactly. For example, I wish that history teachers would just uniformly say, “I am showing you things that I’ve decided to emphasize and omitting different things.” Because I think at that age, you might not realize that there’s so much more to the story than what you’re getting in an economics or a history class. Obviously, in an English class, that could go a million different places, making them realize the whole process of emphasis and omission. That’s a whole other thing to be aware of.
Robinson
Yes, what’s great is you give them such a powerful tool that they can take into other classes. God knows that in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis will be trying to make sure that all history teachers only teach the “correct” view that the Founding Fathers were moral paragons whose works shall not be questioned. But again, for kids, you don’t even have to teach critical race theory, all you have to do is teach critical thinking, and then they will start looking at their history textbooks or thinking about their creationist biology teacher, and perhaps asking some of those questions of: How do I know this is true? Where is this person coming from? Why are they saying what they’re saying?
Shain
Right. What are other people saying about the same topic? How do I find other points of view on this thing? How do I be open-minded to them? What questions should I ask of each thing that I see?
Robinson
One of my favorite exercises you do that you describe in the book—I thought this was great—is you have them try and craft a piece of fake news.
Shain
Yes, they have fun with that. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across Natural News, but it’s one of these absurd sites where they say the public water is tainted so you will buy their vitamins, that global warming is not real, and all this other crazy nonsense. They have fun with that one, the fake news.
Robinson
But there’s a real point to it, which is getting them to think about what might cause other people to believe this thing and realize how persuasive it might be.
Shain
Right, and to also point out that anyone can write anything and put it online. They can easily post some of these crazy things that they come up with, put it online, and are bound to have a few people believe it, whatever it might be.
Robinson
Are there any other of the activities that you have developed with your students that you would recommend to others, in terms of how effective you feel they’ve been?
Shain
Journalists out there will know what the nut graph is. It’s what you learn in journalism classes. For those who don’t know, the lead is at the beginning of the article, which is the main information. The less important parts of the article are toward the bottom because, as the thinking goes, the reader could stop reading at any time. So, I played an episode of The Office for my students of the episode when Dwight starts a mini fire in the office and everyone goes crazy. Then, I asked them to fill out the nut graph as to what details they would emphasize. It was fun to see that all the kids had a slightly different emphasis on what they found important about the episode. Some people said, “this crazy guy started a fire,” and others said, “coworker had a heart attack.” There’s all these different approaches that you could take, and the point is each journalist is going to go a different way with this, depending on what they know and what they’re into.
And even further than that, we talked about how newsrooms go after the easy story. In Scranton, Pennsylvania, there is what’s going on in all kinds of cities right now, a homeless encampment, so why are they covering the crazy office fire instead of this systemic problem going on? The reason, I believe, is it’s easier to do. Police put out press releases, and it’s easy to send a guy over to do that. It’s a lot harder to investigate what on earth is going on here with this homeless issue, for example. We also discussed how many newsrooms just report on what a politician tweeted because it’s an easy thing to cover and do.
There’s, sadly, less and less money out there for investigative journalists, and I try to push them in that direction. There’s all these issues not being covered and bumped up by the algorithm, while everyone in the world knows about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp or whatever. There’s the Steven Donziger thing, the Julian Assange thing—there’s all these issues that are not being covered while everyone is paying attention to what the journalists are emphasizing.
Robinson
At one point in your book, you write teaching this stuff is a little tricky because even though you are teaching them to see through propaganda, you don’t want to leave your students becoming distrustful of everything the media says. In the corporate media unit, for example, you don’t want students conflating CNN, or even Fox News, with the satirical websites, the nonsense, and the Natural News. You have to try and give them a subtle intelligence and the ability to draw distinctions carefully.
Shain
I’ve found a great way to do that, and what brings it all together is looking at the difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. We discuss all of this great journalism that’s been done—real investigative journalism—on the torture program, on finding out about COINTELPRO and MKUltra, and all these actual conspiracies compared with the just absurd story that the guys who made Loose Change put out there.
Robinson
That’s the 9/11 conspiracy documentary.
Shain
Yes, that basically Bush and Cheney exploded the buildings themselves from the ground or something. I explain that the big difference here is there’s evidence to go along with actual government cover-ups conspiracies, while the Loose Change documentary is just a couple of guys spitballing about what might have happened with absolutely no tangible evidence to go along with it. I do not want, by any means, someone to think anything the big networks put out must be fake, and that’s why I spend so much time on emphasis and omission. It’s not necessarily that they’re lying, it’s that they’re really trying to drive a point home and entirely ignoring a whole other point of view, politician, or way of thinking.
Robinson
Right, it’s very rare that an outright factual falsehood is printed as true in the New York Times, for instance.
Shain
And when it is, they tend to correct it. I tried to tie stuff in with the Iraq War—that’s one thing that they got horribly wrong, and did issue a correction. At the same time, we should acknowledge what role they played in that disaster of a war coming to fruition.
Ben Burgis says a great thing, that the government can do things to you or for you. Much of this stuff is the government doing things to people. That’s another thing that I don’t want to do is go through the conspiracy and conspiracy theory unit and have kids say The Government is just doing all these horrible things. You have to also point out all the useful things.
Robinson
Yes. Otherwise, they turn into that administrator who thinks Build Back Better is Stalinism.
To finish up here, we’re in a dangerous time for our public schools. There is an ongoing war on the public education system. If the right has its way, there wouldn’t be a public education system at all. It’d be a series of private religious schools, and maybe you’d get a voucher, or possibly, there’d be online charter schools and you could get a voucher for those. I want to talk to you about the political atmosphere in schools. You really ran head on into the difficulty that can come with teaching real critical thinking in a repressive environment. Could tell us about that?
Shain
I haven’t talked about this publicly yet, but I feel like it’s a good time to do that. This is actually didn’t happen in my journalism class, but in my freshman English class a few years ago. I taught, for the second year in a row, a book that Eli Saslow of the Washington Post wrote called Rising Out of Hatred about a reformed white nationalist, Derek Black. We were halfway through the book, my son had just been born—I wasn’t even at the school when this happened—and one parent complained and was not happy that the book mentions that Black’s dad initially liked Trump.
I was at a charter school, so they can kind of do whatever they want, and the administration pulled the book while I was gone. I wanted to fight back a little bit, and I just said, “What are you doing? We’re halfway done with the book. Can we rethink this thing and not let a single parent dictate the education of all these other kids?” I got back to school and the kids wanted to know what was going on with the book. I wasn’t about to say it was my idea. So, I told them what was going on, and they asked what they could do. I said “You can write to the administration, make your voice heard, and try to get your book back,” because the kids were into it.
This was the beginning of my problems. They did reinstate the book, and it felt like a victory. I met with the parents, and they were happy to hear that when we discuss different forms of Black oppression, I make sure to point out that Joe Biden was an architect of the Crime Bill. They were delighted to hear that. It felt like a victory at the time.
Robinson
They found out you’re a leftist, not a liberal, and that you hate some of the same people they do!
Shain
Right. So, by the end of the year, there were just a couple of these petty complaints. Then the school sent me a letter certified mail that said that they weren’t going to rehire me. And it was awful. It was one of the worst summers of my entire life. Because I really loved my kids at that school. It was brutal, and I tried to contest that as well with the board, and was met with complete disinterest.
This is pretty rich: the way that they docked me for it, since all the official documentation was glowing reviews on my teaching, was they went back and made up this documentation called “informal employee evaluations” where they used charged language like “I incited a student protest” for telling them they could reach out to administration, where I was teaching politics and class on a book they approved—just the most insane stuff. It was brutal. It was a brutal summer.
Robinson
Important to note that, as I understand it, you were non-union in that job.
Shain
Yes, and in my first year at that school, we voted it down. I was obviously not one that did that. But later in the year, everyone’s running out of sick time and saying, “I guess we should have voted for the union.” Yes, we probably should have. And then later on, all this happens to me, contrary to what most of the school wanted—the students, parents, and definitely my co-workers. There’s just no real say when you can’t collectively do anything.
Robinson
Yes. I think that your story goes to a lot of the issues in contemporary education. Conservatives often say that what we need is more parental control, and this shows what you get with more parental control. They also say that teachers need less job security, and we need to be able to fire them more easily because of all the bad teachers, and this shows what happens there. You can see that with the panic about supposed critical race theory, you weren’t teaching anything that even went near it, but because it was political and involved race, all of a sudden, you get an angry parent. What teacher at that school is going to take the risk of going near these issues after you’re let go?
Shain
Exactly. And honestly, I was spoken to a few times about this, and had other ridiculous complaints. I couldn’t even tell what some of them were over. I would ask them if this about the critical thinking thing, or the manufacturing consent thing, and they never really said. It was just someone complained because you’re doing politics in class. There was a culture in that school, in my last year, where I was afraid to even mention the Tulsa Massacre. I was afraid to do this in a class because of what might happen, and how that particular administration—to be clear, at a former job—did not remotely hold the line in the name of education. It’s just a sorry excuse, for a supposedly academic place, when you can’t get away with talking about these important pressing issues.
Robinson
Your book is called Education Revolution, and the ideas that you advocate in it might seem to be like things that we should obviously teach. Critical thinking shouldn’t be controversial. But as you point out, this is an education revolution because kids aren’t taught these things and teachers who take your proposals seriously here, in some cases and depending on where they are, will have to fight. There will be a struggle.
Shain
Absolutely, and I hope that they do. I hope that administrators understand what’s at stake here. And that they hold the line, don’t say sorry, or take a neutral tone at the bare minimum. If the teacher is merely teaching something that happened, teaching a book that might be a little controversial, you need to hold the line. And teachers need to dare to do this sort of thing, despite my story.
At this point, I’m at a union job at a public school. It turned out okay for me, and I want to make that clear. For myself and many other teachers that I’ve taught with, we simply don’t see the point in the work unless you can teach stuff that matters. I want to teach them to write better, to speak and listen, and what the standards say, for sure, but to also have all of this beneficial material that most certainly should be in the standards as it is.
Robinson
Your book comes with some great blurbs taken from anonymous reviews from high school students of your journalism class. “I think more deeply, I’ve become more open-minded.” “I learned that you must view everything with an open mind, and not let one article guide my opinion.” “I learned so much,” one says, “about viewing the world, especially mass media, through a critical eye. This year, I learned about what traps we fall into while viewing media and how we can prevent that. I learned good versus questionable journalism tactics, and how this could affect how accurate a news source is.”
And so, you can see that you are instilling students with the skill that they can then take into the world to become more rational and cautious consumers of media and better citizens of our democracy.
Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth. Full conversation can be heard on the Current Affairs podcast.
