"No they don't," another student scoffed. "Their eyes are red."
"Why would I tell you that if it wasn't true?" I asked him.
"You can't trust anyone," he shrugged. "Where did you hear that anyway?"
"Pretty sure it was a NY Times article," I answered, "but it may have been Scientifica American. They are both pretty credible sources."
Meanwhile the first student was busy researching. "They can have blue or green eyes," she reluctantly admitted, "but it's RARE."
"I know," I said, "because that's what I read in the article."
This conversation came just a day after one of my homeroom students told us that he was skeptical that men had ever landed on the moon. "I'm not saying it didn't happen," he shook his head, "I'm just saying that 1969 technology really wasn't up to the job. Think about it."
As the only person in the room alive in 1969, I did think about it, with some concern.
When some of his classmates pushed back a little, he retorted with a facile, "How do you know? Were you there?"
The issue of fake news, trusted sources, and firsthand experience will be one of the central issues of this generation. As a global community, we have to agree on some basic facts, but that very consensus is being eroded by the same technology we rely on to provide us with information. People who are just a little older than these kids grew up in a world where most of us did trust the majority of information from verified sources and we did not assume that other people were intentionally misleading us.
Without such an anchor, we can only do our best to prepare these kids and provide them the tools they will need to invent new navigational systems that will allow them to move forward through this storm of information.
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