"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast… It would be so nice if something made sense for a change." Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland)

Spotting fake news: New skills or old competences?

Initiatives fighting fake news seem to multiply as fast as fake news themselves. Hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new programme or study to tackle fake news. Just at EU level this year, the European Commission has appointed a High-Level Expert Group on fake news, launched a #SaferInternet4EU campaign, announced that the Joint Research Centre is developing a tool to monitor fake news during next year's EU election, and proposed an EU-wide Code of Practice on Disinformation. But are we really so ill-equipped to handle fake news and teach children these skills?

The first wave of initiatives tackling fake news focused on the production of news. The underlying assumption is that citizens may not recognise fake news when they see them, and therefore efforts should be made to try to limit their exposure to fake news. This can be done by fact-checking, labelling stories as fake, and eliminating them before they spread. Unfortunately, this strategy has already proven to be an unwinnable battle. And in a world in which social media companies are known to sell private data not only to businesses but also to governments and political campaigns, it is surely unrealistic to expect that only high quality, reliable information will survive.

Accordingly governments, international organisations and social media companies like Facebook have turned their attention to the consumers of digital news, and in particular to children and young adults. From national campaigns like Italy's new curriculum teaching high school students how to recognise and expose fake news to OECD's new PISA module measuring children's global competence – including the skill to "spot fake news" – there is a wave of action to develop new curricula, online learning tools, and resources for teachers.

The burden of responsibility for implementing these initiatives will inevitably fall on schools. However, it is crucial not to treat the skills involved in spotting fake news as something new that schools need to begin teaching. The skills to recognise and respond to fake news – critical thinking, media and numerical literacy, as well as knowledge about history, other cultures and religions – are all a part of the key competences that schools already develop. Indeed literacy competence – "the ability to identify, understand, express, create, and interpret concepts, feelings, facts and opinions" – and digital competence – "the confident, critical and responsible use of, and engagement with, digital technologies for learning, at work, and for participation in society" are two of the eight key competences for lifelong learning that the European Commission adopted in January 2018. Critical thinking and content analysis underpin both of them.

Critical thinking is a transversal skill developed across a number of different spheres, and should be applied when browsing social media, watching TV, or reading traditional print media. The idea that schools can teach critical thinking specifically to deal with fake news outside of this broader social context is short-sighted. Most countries have actually recognised this, and – as the 2017 Eurydice report on citizenship education shows – they use a cross-curriculum approach to integrate critical thinking into broader subject areas such as the social sciences or languages, or as a cross-curricular objective delivered by all teachers.

These days, fake news can mean factually incorrect information, misleading representation of facts, and also opinions with which you don't agree, as exemplified by the New Yorker's observation of U.S. President Donald J. Trump's understanding of the term as "credible reporting that he doesn't like". Teaching children how to spot and eliminate fake news as a skill independent from the broader literacy and cultural awareness competences carries the hidden danger of teaching them how to label and dismiss opinions with which they don't agree as fake news. This is not going to contribute to the development of responsible citizens ready to engage in robust democratic discourse. On the contrary, such a strategy may result in disengagement with different points of view and avoidance of unfamiliar sources of information.

The key competences are a combination of knowledge, skills and attitude. But developing the attitudes necessary to react responsibly to fake news once they are identified has been missing from these latest initiatives. A sceptical attitude is key to evaluating any information, regardless of whether the source is a blog, the online edition of a long-standing newspaper, a government website, or a website hosting leaked government documents.

So perhaps it is time to concentrate on what schools do most effectively. Rather than adding new curriculum components, additional learning metrics, and examination modules, why not simply support teachers and parents to help children navigate through our world of mis/information that is almost certainly here to stay.

Authors: Ralitsa Donkova and David Crosier