The handout below surfaced in a Florida sixth-grade class.
It’s not an approved lesson. It was created by a teacher, on his own initiative, and distributed to students by a substitute. The school subsequently got complaints from parents (see story here).
Let’s examine this.
“President Trump” is a factual statement that was accurate until noon of January 20, 2021, and after that was inaccurate. Therefore, any statement prefaced by the phrase “President Trump” must refer to claims he made before that time, or it is inaccurate.
The phrase “false claims” is accurate. His claims that “the 2020 election was stolen” are false. This wasn’t necessarily firmly established until some fuzzily-defined point in time, but it has always been true that the 2020 election wasn’t “stolen.” Therefore, the second sentence is also just giving you information.
If the objective of this lesson is to teach students to withhold judgment before they “have all of the facts,” that’s not really preparing them for adult responsibilities — assuming that’s what K-12 education is for — because there are lots of times, in fact more often than not, that grownups have to reach conclusions or make judgments based on incomplete, uncertain, or missing facts. Adulthood is a never-ending fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
It would be better to teach them how to fill in the blanks, as best as possible in the circumstances. For example, what is Trump’s evidence that the election was stolen? Is the evidence from credible sources, and is it believable? What alternative explanations are possible? If there’s a conflict between what Trump says and the media says, whose factual claims are more likely accurate? In other words, teach them a process for ascertaining what the facts are.
But if I have to make a snap judgment, I’m going to believe every time he is wrong before I have all of the facts, because Trump is a prolific self-serving liar.
That’s a fact.