by Tom Pantera
Columnist

Among the many maxims coined by Will Rogers, one has always had special resonance for journalists and teachers.

“It’s not what people don’t know that’s the problem, but what they think they know that just ain’t so,” Rogers said.

Of course, in a presidential election year that becomes particularly vexing. To paraphrase another old saying, truth is the first casualty of politics. And in a time where politics has become largely a matter of marketing, truth just doesn’t simply seem to matter. In fact, this year, with the Romney-Ryan ticket having been caught in more than a few pretty egregious fibs, the talk on many left-leaning websites has become about “the era of post-truth politics,” which seems like a pretty tortured way to refer to what most people would call “lies.”

Still, politics is what it is. Nobody has ever given politicians points for honesty. No politician who stated the obvious – that no matter how much people bitch, this country needs to raise taxes to get out of the financial hole we’re in – would even make it to the general election, must less win whatever office he’s running for. The best we can hope for is that whoever wins gets into office and actually does what needs to be done, no matter how unpalatable it is to most of the electorate.

Of course, some people just punt the entire idea of gauging truth. They simply find an authority and latch onto it like a remora. Biblical fundamentalists, for example, have found an authority in which to put stock. If it contradicts a literal reading of the Bible, it simply isn’t the truth. Such a belief doesn’t allow much room for nuance; those of us who disagree with it find it more than a little bizarre that people would base life in the 21st century on a book written to guide Bronze Age folks. And what’s more, it’s a book that’s been repeatedly translated and revised, so even if you wanted to take it literally, the question is: which version?

But those are large questions. People judge truth and falsehood a thousand times every day. They look out the window on a winter morning and judge the weather report to be true. They get a seemingly inexplicable directive from the boss and gauge whether it’s to actually help the company succeed or just make management look good. They argue with their spouse and try to determine whether that person is telling them the whole truth or fudging facts to win the debate.

And often as not, you never really know if you’re hearing the truth. You never have all the information you need, so you go with what you know and fill in the empty spaces with feelings from your gut.

It’s a particularly vexing problem for those of us who teach. Even if you have long experience in the field you’re teaching, you have to allow that things may have changed in ways you don’t know and what you’re telling your students may be less than truthful, despite your best efforts. You also have to admit your own prejudices. I’m considerably more liberal than the parents of many of my students and I always take great pains to add a disclaimer when I’m stating something that’s my opinion during a lecture. I don’t teach political science, but a journalism teacher’s beliefs can color his judgments about what’s good and bad in the field and I have to be aware of that.

I have to be especially careful because contrary to what many say, college students desperately want to learn. One of the most amazing and beautiful things about teaching college is that by and large, students want to know what you’re trying to teach them. I can count on one hand the number of students I’ve taught in the last five years who were just putting in their time. I’m a pretty good teacher, and I know how to get students engaged, but you can’t sell anything to somebody who simply isn’t interested in buying. And I’ve found my students want to use their tuition money to buy knowledge that will benefit them.

Students also get a bad rap from us older folks for gaps in their knowledge. A lot of grumpy older folks like to point out that a lot of kids know social media backwards and forwards but don’t know who won the Civil War. And everybody has their horror stories about young people they’ve dealt with; a friend of mine recently attempted to buy a drink from a kid who didn’t understand the concept of decaffeinated coffee.

But there are always a few outliers, people who are so clueless that no amount of education can help them. And such people can even succeed, as long as they manage to hook up with an organization run on the Peter Principle, that people in a hierarchy rise to their level of incompetence.

Young people today also face a problem people in older generations didn’t have. There’s simply a lot more to know now. When I graduated from journalism school in 1981, all I needed to know was how to write for a newspaper and maybe how to take and develop photos. Now, a journalism student needs to know not just that, but how to put the work product onto a web page in a way that will make people want to access it. And believe me, that’s not an easy task.

So give our young people a bit of a break. They face a world in which facts are slippery things, subject to massaging both great and minor, and are also more numerous than any of us can imagine. If they can just learn enough to be productive, contributing citizens, we in the older generation will have done our job well.