According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word of 2016 was “post-truth”, an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.
Its popularity has obviously been created by the two political shocks of our era, first Brexit, then Trump, now (un)safely ensconced in office. This causes me to consider what responsibility teachers might take for these two quite illogical decisions: one predicted to cost this country’s taxpayers billions of pounds, the other putting a mercurial egomaniac in charge of the world’s most powerful country.
The vast majority of citizens who voted depending on how they felt, rather than the facts presented to them, have gone through some form of schooling system, whether here or in the US. Yet in making these momentous decisions, they have wilfully ignored everything they have ever been taught in the classroom about critical thinking, instead voting on gut instinct. It’s annoying enough when the status of knowledge is ignored in the classroom, but absolutely exasperating when it’s disregarded on the world stage.
But maybe it’s our fault for being too focused on teaching pupils how to use facts to pass exams when we should have been showing how to apply them in real life. So that when someone reads on the side of a big red bus that, by voting Leave, the £350 million the UK sends to the EU weekly will now be spent on the NHS, they might question the logic. It seems hard to imagine that someone could actually believe in the possibility of an idyllic British future, where every three weeks we would save enough to build yet another superhospital as good as the Queen Elizabeth in Glasgow, and no one would ever be ill again.
Of course, many will argue that teachers should be the last group to feel guilty for 2016. After all, it was the people who went on to education after school who voted for Remain and Clinton, rather than those who followed less academic paths, and those who went on to university couldn’t have got there without their teachers.
But what about the ones who sat in our classrooms and felt left behind? Maybe they first felt the urge to upset the Establishment after having to listen to us teachers telling them they were failing for a large part of their lives growing up, simply because their skills were not academic. Perhaps voting to upset the liberal social order was their way of metaphorically sticking two fingers up at their teachers’ nannying ways.
Instead of casting blame on those who voted for radical change, we all need to examine whether we, too, created the conditions for Brexit and Trump.
Gordon Cairns is a teacher of English in Scotland
