After adopting fake news class, UW moves forward to teach ‘truth’

University of Washington’s newest political science class asks one question: How do we know what’s true?

RELATED: UW officially adopts course fighting fake news

UW made headlines in July when it permanently adopted a class about battling fake news into its regular curriculum. Next up on the docket for the university is a class that asks each of its students to question their fundamental beliefs in favor of getting to the objective truth.

“My starting point is ‘recognize that you’re wrong some of the time,'” the class’s professor Mark A. Smith told Seattle’s Morning News on KIRO Radio.

The class, officially titled “Seeking Truth in an Age of Cynicism and Political Polarization,” is specifically designed to challenge each student to eschew with their own biases and preconceptions.

Living in an age where acting as though your opinion is objectively true is seen as a display of strength, Professor Smith seeks to stop rewarding this behavior, and instead encourage people to step outside themselves.

“In the modern age of social media, it really rewards people that make statements and make them with absolute certainty,” he noted.

Rather than encouraging that stance, the goal of this class is to “recognize that we need conversations with other people.” Whenever public discourse doesn’t come from that place, Smith warned against dire consequences for our greater society as a whole.

“We have to recognize that we need conversations with other people,” he said. “As soon as we lose conversations across all of our lines of difference, you’ve given up the whole search for truth.”

The fight against fake news

Under a trial run for UW’s class focused on fake news, there were two courses offered teaching critical thinking skills, focusing on facts and data. They were led by Professors Jevin West and Carl Bergstrom. The first class was strictly a lecture course for a single credit.

The second run at the course was a three-credit version and was more interactive. About 160 students signed up, and after a successful run, it evolved from an experimental class, to a full-fledged addition to UW’s curriculum.

This and Professor Smith’s class stand as important in today’s political landscape. A recent study found only 36 percent of politically-aware Americans were able to fully determine fact from opinion. Only 44 percent of digital-savvy Americans were able to do the same.

If these classes can do enough to move that needle even a fraction in the right direction, perhaps there could yet be hope for the future of American political discourse.