I think I stumbled into committing an interesting social faux pas last week.  Interesting because I never saw it coming.  Interesting because it’s normally one of my pet peeves.  Interesting because of the lessons I re-learned. And interesting in the implications for education, both traditional and ongoing.
Perhaps you’ve seen the story or video clip of the Washington Post experiment to plant Joshua Bell, internationally-renowned violinist, into a subway entrance, playing difficult music with a valuable 300-year-old violin.  The music is exquisite, but folks on a commute barely stop to listen.
One of the video clips of this ended up in my e-mail, and since I’ve been working on trying to be aware of the beauty/good around me lately, I was intrigued.  Without thinking too much more about it, I immediately passed it along to a couple dozen friends I thought would appreciate it as well. And, for the most part, they did – or so their responses would indicate.
Later, I read some of the originally-posted comments accompanying the clip.  One person said something like “the event is staged to favor the author’s conclusion.  Even music lovers don’t really have time to stop and listen on a hectic commute, even if they want to.”  And the comment rang true.  (Later, I heard a similar comment from one of the local recipients of my forwarding, who had the courage to admit she was slightly bothered by the clip, since she is both an employee on a schedule and a music lover.)
Later that morning, I stumbled across an article by Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post reporter who wrote the original story of the experiment.  He was ‘setting the record straight’ about some things that the exact clip I received/circulated had gotten wrong or misinterpreted, intentionally or not.  Some of the complaints were borderline nit-picky, perhaps, but some were not.  That’s when I began to wonder if I had maybe shared prematurely.
I think in the end, not much damage was done.  Maybe.  Nonetheless, I had to confess:  I had received something I liked and had immediately passed it along, not bothering too much to ‘fact-check’ or ‘perspective-check’.  I was hit harder by this partly because one of my pet peeves is folks doing the same with political rants, when checking-before-forwarding (Snopes.com, etc.)  would be easy.
Lots of points and lessons to ponder here still – at least for me – but let’s cut straight to education. 
When many of us were growing up in school, we basically only shared others’ ideas in reports, papers, debates, and the like.  We knew not to rely on ‘opinions only’ to build our case, and we knew not to quote someone without meticulous citation, chapter and verse, so to speak. 
How do we translate that carefulness into today’s frantic, divisive, and instant-forward society, where ‘fake news’ takes on a life of its own? Weingarten calls this “the power and peril of the Web”. 
How do we grapple with this?  Can fake news only be stopped by awareness and education?
If so, what a formidable job our schools now have preparing our students for this atmosphere!  They must prepare students (in a neutral manner!) to recognize possible fallacies or manipulations of facts and stories.  They must prepare them to be aware of protecting both the truth in general and themselves as they do this!!  It is a task fraught with dark forest paths and hidden quicksand, but the skills must be learned and used – for society’s sake. 
And WE often need these lessons/reminders as much as our youngsters, as I re-learned first-hand!