A writing assignment for the times

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As the dog days of late August drag on, seemingly beyond their allotted 24 hours, Nebraskans know what to expect in the lethargy brought on by endless heat and humidity.

School starts.

While asking young minds to focus in the swelter may seem counterintuitive to the learning process, air-conditioning and some inexplicable wont to dismiss the young’uns well before Memorial Day have teamed up to push the first day of school further from the traditional end of summer, Labor Day. (Those of a certain demographic will recall school always starting the Tuesday after the first Monday in September.)

Even as the 2024-2025 school year unfolds in the midst of a presidential election campaign, ongoing wars and, in Nebraska, a special session of the Legislature, public schools remain ground zero in the culture wars, where hearts and minds and a child’s education are at stake.

This space has made that point when protesters disrupted school board meetings and threatened board members, when districts removed books from public school classrooms and libraries and when teachers were forced to delete part of American history but post the Ten Commandments and weave the Bible into lesson plans.

There’s more: While the Nebraska Legislature’s special session ostensibly was about property tax relief, in reality senators were deciding how we were going to pay for public schools. Add to that a ballot measure in November that will determine if the state will go ahead with a “voucher” system to fund students’ education in private or parochial schools. Recent news from Arizona presents a cautionary tale on that front. Pro Publica reported the state, once considered the gold standard for voucher programs, has a $1.4 billion budget shortfall, much of which is being attributed to its voucher system.

Those are just details. The public school picture is bigger, much bigger. When one combines the push for narrower, insular books and curricula with biblical underpinnings with systems using tax money from public coffers to pay for private education, the entire future of our public schools is at stake. In a state where we’ve etched into the Capitol the idea of citizen watchfulness — the result of a good public education — red flags should be flying.

Speaking of curriculum, two recents events further convinced me that schools should require courses on crap detection, giving students both the skills to call out a lie when they see it and an understanding of the damage that can be done when such deceit carries the day.

Here’s the first writing assignment: Explain and analyze the overuse of “falsely claimed,” the euphemistic phrase now-common among news reports that reads, feels and sounds like a 36-grit sandpaper shiatsu.

For the record: Falsely claimed as in “She falsely claimed the sky is falling” means she lied, as in “She lied about the sky falling.”

Students should read a morning news report or watch an evening news broadcast to see its (and other substitutes for “lying”) use in the media.

Those expecting a good grade will discuss in their paper why the use of euphemisms to soften or otherwise deflect the stridency of some political language usually morphs into a debate over the demerits of political correctness.

While taking into account the reality that journalists simply run out of ways to describe something without being overly repetitious, students should also discuss the consequences of failing to call out lies in news reports or employing words or phrases that deflect or distort reality.

As a resource, read a transcript of a recent press conference when fact checkers determined the GOP candidate for president “falsely claimed” 162 times in just over an hour. Then, assess the impact of the “PBS NewsHour” later choosing to describe the press conference as “scattershot,” rather than 64 minutes of lies.

For background, students should read two credible sources reporting on the riots across England that exploded after an online post misidentified the person who attacked and killed three young girls. An online onslaught misidentified him as a Syrian refugee seeking asylum and a Muslim. Social media posts even made up the name of the attacker. What followed were days of violence as protesteors attacked refugee housing and refugees themselves.

Finally, after assessing how we treat misinformation, how we choose to report and identify it, and what are its consequences are, explain how the problem should be solved.

Yes, it’s a tough assignment: reading, writing, arithmetic, research, crap detection and problem solving.

Ironically, just what’s needed to keep public schools — any schools—- on top of their game, even in the dog days of summer.