Headmaster at Leweston School, Dorset, John Paget-Tomlinson, considers the challenges around misinformation and disinformation in the modern world, the impact this is having on pupils, and why independent schools are well placed to lead a structural response.
As a history teacher I have always found rich material in the deliberate distortion of truth. Operation Fortitude, convincing the Nazi leadership that a whole army group was massing in Kent aimed at the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy, never failed to delight a GCSE class. The fall of the Knights Templar, and Philip IV’s fabricated allegations that brought an entire order to its knees through manufactured outrage, reliably turned fascination into moral fury. What I didn’t anticipate was that these would become less historical curiosities and more instruction manuals for the world our pupils now inhabit.
The crisis unfolding in our schools does not announce itself with a safeguarding referral. Yet its consequences can be just as serious. In the 1990s a child in the UK formed their opinions through a small circle: family, friends, teachers, print media, television. That circle could be monitored and, to a degree, influenced. Now, the hundred people who might once have shaped a young person’s worldview have been replaced by potentially six billion, and the adults who know that child best have almost no control over what they encounter…