Unravelling the Links between Education and Democracy

Kenneth King

Emeritus Professor, University of Edinburgh

Kenneth.King@ed.ac.uk

Delights and Delusions of ‘Democracy’

• Until 1948, plural voting was allowed in the UK, once in your university constituency and once in your home. Some voted 5 times! My father voted twice when he was a university student in 1930s.

• Some prime-ministers, e.g. UK’s Johnson, have been ‘democratically’ elected by a fraction of the electorate. In his case by just 160k Conservative Party votes – less than 1% of the UK electorate!

• What other examples come to mind? What about the well-known Jan Smuts in S Africa, and the many leaders before multi-party democracy was promoted in 1990?

• And how is ‘democracy’ or ‘good government’ taught in schools & done in univs?

• And what about the UN Declaration of Human Rights [Dec.1948]? ‘Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives’ Article 21. Much of the world still under colonial rule.

KK and PK’s Backgrounder on BREXIT

• The British electorate was asked to decide on a ‘simple’ question on June 23rd 2016.

• Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union? Choose one of these with X

• Remain a member of the European UnionLeave the European Union

• No discussion of Irish border & backstop, visas, health insurance in EU, fall in value of sterling, single market, customs union.

• Now there is the need for a glossary of the Brexit debate

Referenda and Representative Democracy:Which of these = ‘Will of the People’?• The European Single Market, Internal Market or Common Market is

a single market which seeks to guarantee the free movement of goods, capital, services, and labour – the ‘four freedoms‘ – within the European Union (EU) – see Wiki for details

• Different democracies: Referendums or Referenda are a form of direct democracy. Representative democracy as in the UK is another form.

• If you hold referenda, you should perhaps ensure that there is a minimum threshold set for it to be binding = majority of 60%. In the 1975 Referendum about whether the UK should remain in the EU which it had joined in 1973, the majority to remain was 62%.

Here are the numbers for ‘Will of the People’:Same number didn’t vote as voted ‘Leave’

United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016National result

Choice Votes %

Leave the European Union 17,410,742 51.89%

Remain a member of the European Union

16,141,241 48.11%

Valid votes 33,551,983 99.92%

Invalid or blank votes 25,359 0.08%

Total votes 33,577,342 100.00%

Registered voters and turnout 46,500,001 72.21%

Voting age population and turnout 51,356,768 65.38%

Source: Electoral Commission

Summary

• The connections of education with development outcomes, including global citizenship, democracy and good governance

• The role of education, and other factors, in the UK’s EU Referendum and in the Trump election

• Formal education not the only source of information & disinformation on citizenship, nationalism, immigration etc – the massive role of social media & of micro-targeting of disinformation at elections.

• Implications for critical digital literacy in formal education

• Education & SDG4 on their own cannot deliver on democratic engagement; they need an enabling environment

Education as a critical factor in UK’s EU Referendum(2016) & Trump election (2016)

• There is a long-standing background literature on how ‘education plays a key role in promoting democratic values’ and how four more years of education makes a difference in accessing news articles on politics (GMR 2012-13). Tabloid vs serious press not discussed.

• Best evidence on role of education in EU Referendum is that 78% of those with degrees voted to Remain in the EU & 72% of those with no qualifications voted to Leave the EU. (overall 51.89% of electorate voted Leave and 48.11% voted Remain)

• There are similar results for college-educated vs non college-educated whites voting for and against Trump respectively in the 2016 election

BREXIT & education unravelled

• Data from British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 34 (2017) confirms that other factors, e.g. age & class, played a secondary role.

• eg.80% of 18-24 year-olds voted to Remain & 63% of 65+ voted Leave

• The combination of Age & Education confirms key role of Education

• But what is it about higher education that might encourage critical attitudes towards electioneering?

• Might the development of critical thinking with higher levels of education make it easier to deal with fake news & disinformation in campaigns for Leave & Remain?

The role of social media in political engagement

• Arguably, social media played a crucial role in both the UK Referendum (BREXIT) campaign & the US election

• In both countries, this has been intensively investigated, including in the UK by the Parliamentary Committee on Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS, Feb 2019).

• There is clear evidence of the use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica to support micro-targeting of certain populations through ‘dark ads’ with Leave propaganda.

• Massive micro-targeting by Cambridge Analytica, via social media & its algorithms, in UK in days before the BREXIT vote. This may help explain rise in Leave voters from 20+% (from 2003) to 41% in 2016

Social media messaging and its implications for democracy

• According to DCMS, the ‘ relentless targeting of hyper-partisan views which play to the prejudices of people, in order to influence their voting plans and their behaviour’ concerns ‘the very future of democracy’.

• According to former CEO of Cambridge Analytica: ‘We are trying to make sure that voters receive messages on the issues and policies that they care most about, and we are trying to make sure that they are not bombarded with irrelevant materials. That can only be good. That can only be good for politics, it can only be good for democracy’

• According to Theresa May, any proposal for a 2nd Referendum- ‘would be a gross betrayal of democracy’

Social media messaging & its implications for education

• The sheer extent of micro-targeting of particular constituencies with false or misleading advertisements around BREXIT has led DCMS to claim the need for radical rethinking of implications for education:

“ If we are talking about news and media literacy curricula, that has to include how to evaluate an algorithm and how to understand how what you see on Amazon, Netflix or Facebook has been decided by an algorithm, how an algorithm gets developed, how it is created by a certain person and how their biases might shape that. That has to be part of the teaching that we give to people (quoted in DCMS, 2018: 61).

• See following ‘dark ads’ distributed just before BREXIT June 2016

A ‘dark ad’ -Scare-mongering about mass immigration when no plans for Turkey to join EU

Vote Leave had an advert on buses about £350 million going to EU each week

Vote Leave had advert on buses about £350 million going to EU each week

These ‘dark ads’ were only extracted from Facebook two years after BREXIT vote

• One ad featuring Jeremy Corbyn, which was targeted at younger voters and accompanied by an old quote from the Labour leader: "The EU takes away from national parliaments the power to set

economic policy and hands it over to an unelected set of bankers."

Need for critical digital literacy in education

• In a situation in the UK – & certainly the US – where 95% of 15 year-olds use social media before or after school..

• It is argued by DCMS:

‘Digital literacy should become the fourth pillar of education, alongside reading, writing and maths’

The stark conclusion of their Feb 2019 report to the UK Parliament is:

‘Our democracy is at risk, and now is the time to act to protect our shared values and the integrity of our democratic institutions’

Global Dimensions of Disinformation & the challenge to Global Citizenship Education

• Electoral disinformation of this sort not restricted to UK and USA, but has occurred in over 20 countries’ elections in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Caribbean; a global challenge to democracy, including Korea

• Implications for global citizenship education (GCE) when schools themselves can be sources of stereotyping, ethnic resentment etcaccording to the Global Education First Initiative.

• The schools, arguably, have a long way to go on SDG Target 4.7 before they add the major challenge of promoting critical digital literacy

• For Fake News in the USA, see the fake author, Ron Vara, used by Peter Navarro, Trump’s advisor on China, for hate-China rhetoric.

Education, Democratic Values & the Enabling Environment for Digital Literacy and SDG4.7• The idea that so many years of education (including HE) can, on their

own, make a difference to democratic values is flawed

• If the values of SDG4.7 are to be put in place by education (‘sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity’), there needs to be a wider enabling, participatory, political environment.

• It is worth noting that the crucially important SDG4.7 Target is receiving much less traction than SDG4.1 - 4.6. UIS (2018) don’t even provide global indicators for SDG4.7

A Final Word by the UN on Democracy’s Relationship with Education & Development• In the only use of the terms democracy or democratic in the whole

document for the 2030 SDG agenda, the UN specifies that social development (which would include education) has to depend on wider elements being in place:

“…a world] in which democracy, good governance and the rule of law, as well as an enabling environment at the national and international levels, are essential for sustainable development, including sustained and inclusive economic growth, social development, environmental protection and the eradication of poverty and hunger” (UN, 2015:4).

Your Research at School & University Level

• Discover if any initiatives have been taken in the school curriculum in the area of civics or social studies to alert students to this brave new world of targeting via social media.

• Are ministries of education concerned to promote critical digital literacy in their civics curricula? How can students be prepared for the realities of this new politics?

• In fact, digital literacy is separate from computer literacy. It requires critical thinking skills, an awareness of the necessary standards of behaviour expected in online environments, and an understanding of the shared social issues created by digital technologies. Or alternatively: digital literacy = digital tool knowledge + critical thinking + social engagement.

Misinformation, digital literacy and the school curriculum. (Polizzi and Taylor, LSE, 2019)

• As misinformation takes on new and viral forms in the digital age, teaching children how to identify it has become urgent. But while digital literacy is crucial, there is no clear and unified framework on how to promote it.

• Digital literacy is a complex topic to teach and learn, and needs to be taught across a number of different subject areas. The [UK} Government thinks the national curriculum needs no revision to promote digital literacy, but there is evidence that shows otherwise.

• The national curriculum falls short of teaching primary and secondary school children about the broader digital environment. As with existing teaching resources, it overlooks how their digital skills and knowledge about the internet can be used to identify misinformation. Teaching resources, furthermore, focus predominantly on traditional media bias over online misinformation.

• Teachers need training about how to teach children the skills and knowledge they require, while we also need research on teachers’ levels of digital literacy.

Further reading? Check websites orask me by email: Kenneth.King@ed.ac.uk

• DCMS (Digital, Media, Culture and Sport Committee), 2018. Disinformation and ‘fake news’: final report, Feb. 2019, House of Commons, London. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/1791/1791.pdf

• British Social Attitudes 34, The vote to leave the EU, National Centre for Social Research. London, accessed on 14th October 2018 at http://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39149/bsa34_brexit_final.pdf

• King, K. 2014. Education, global citizenship and democracy in post-2015 landscapes. International seminar on democracy, education and development: Issues relating to inclusion, equity and sustainability, March 6-8, 2014, NUEPA, New Delhi

• This PPT has a published paper in Asia Pacific Review of Education 2019

• Polizzi, G and Taylor, R, 2019. Misinformation, digital literacy and the school curriculum, LSE, London