As I was relishing the last bits of summer in Shanghai, a barrage of WeChat Channels videos (Chinese equivalent of Instagram reels) invaded my family’s group chat. Some of the headlines I remember roughly translated to “What we are most afraid of has happened,” “Water is the source of life but may become a force of death,” “the Japanese water conspiracy,” etc. My grandma urged us to stop consuming seafood immediately. My aunt said something about Japan conspiring to poison China. It was all pretty apocalyptic, until my dad responded with a smug “lol.” If I’m being honest, I wasn’t too compelled to read into this further; it was the last few glorious days of summertime and what I thought was another instance of “colonial beef ” between China and Japan was not the note I was going to end my summer on.
Two days later, my freshman year physics teacher (from my school in Shanghai) voiced her opinions on WeChat Moments (Chinese equivalent of an Instagram post, or maybe a tweet). She recalled that the release of nuclear wastewater into the ocean was actually a simulation prompt she used in her IB Physics class and that she “could not believe that Japan was pulling this shit,” and as a member of the scientific community, she believed this to be a global environmental tragedy. She urged all her students to study nuclear half-life and degradation. What I perceived as a strictly political conflict between national propaganda machines now became an actual scientific controversy. If someone as well read and scientifically informed as my physics teacher believed the nuclear wastewater would significantly threaten marine ecosystems and human health, there must be some validity to the headlines I had seen.
Around the same time, my “Moments page” began to fill with elegies for seafood imported from Japan and calls to savor our last bits of Japanese food before the contamination. As any Deerfield student would do, I turned to my trusty search engine. I skimmed through a lot of articles, but there was so much I could not understand, most of which either was scientific expertise or poli-historical context surrounding why certain stakeholders like the Chinese media, or Korean fishermen reacted the way they did.
Grappling with the cognitive dissonance I felt when faced with conflicting knowledge from people I trusted and news outlets I subscribed to was uncomfortable. It mixed the personal and the political, and showed me that, in the somewhat rare case that current events immediately, personally concerned me, I lacked the literacy, bravery, patience, and time to get to the bottom of what felt like an inscrutable political and scientific maze. When I had a stake in the issue, I could not take a stance.
This discomfort pushed me to think about how I engaged with the news in my daily life. I thought about every neon-illustrated Instagram infographic that I consumed and took as truth in place of investigating myself. I thought about everytime I woke up in the morning, opened my New York Times app, scrolled at the headlines, and then got distracted trying to solve the Wordle or mini-crossword. I thought about every time I didn’t dig deeper when I didn’t understand the political, historical, or scientific context of an event, either because I was lazy, busy, embarrassed of my ignorance, or just complacent.
My simplistic engagement with Instagram reels and infographics, memory of one-liner headlines, and uncontextualized understanding of current events fell short when it really mattered. When my sister asked me why people around us were boycotting seafood, I could not explain to her the political weaponization of the media and why I did not trust the videos we kept receiving in our family group chat. I also could not explain why, despite pretty extensive scientific discussion of this issue, the world could not come to a consensus on what to believe. Finally, I could not articulate my discontent with my own understanding of the issue; I wanted to change but didn’t even know where to begin.
I know many people around me have had similar experiences: My friend and I keep setting goals for ourselves to read the news every day and then failing. There have been quite a few Scroll articles written about how ignorant we are. Of course, I graciously accept their critique, but characterizing our student body as grossly ignorant to current events is an oversimplification. When I brought up the Fukushima nuclear wastewater release to my peers, most people had at least some idea of what I was talking about. Lots of buzz words like wastewater, Japan, seafood, and radioactivity were vaguely tossed around. Some incorrectly asked me if the incident was related to the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. Overwhelmingly, the most common response was “I think I heard about this somewhere,” or that “this sounds familiar.” What stood out to me the most was not a downright lack of awareness of current events, but rather, half-baked understandings of them.
Though I definitely believe engaging with current events is a personal responsibility, this phenomenon isn’t surprising when you examine the ways Deerfield collectively interacts with current events and news. I genuinely believe that our community has tried to integrate political discussion and current events engagement into our lives. We now have an annual Deerfield Forum. The Scroll publishes its Global News Update, a listicle of news from the past few weeks. Increasingly, history teachers have incorporated current events into their classes. Personally, I know that across the Honors United States History (HUSH) classes, History and Social Science Teachers John Lim and Julia Rivellino-Lyons have tried to implement some sort of engagement with news. In a variety of small ways, we have tried to incorporate current events in digestible ways to our daily lives. These efforts are commendable! I speak for myself, but I have definitely learned a thing or two from these microdoses of the outside world. I’m even quite proud of myself when I already know the news that we discuss at the beginning of Period 3 HUSH. Even if I stumbled across those headlines on my way to the Wordle, I feel good. Competent, even.
But that self-satisfaction is concerning. Engaging with news in a vacuum or in small, inconsistent doses, and only through headlines, key words, and summaries, defeats the purpose of engaging with current events and striving to be a global citizen. In an effort to entice busy students to keep up with headlines, we have created bare-minimum understandings of the world that are not just bare, but also counterproductive, because they make us complacent. Current events cannot be digestible because the world itself is not.
I think we miss the mark at Deerfield in a few key ways. First, when we do engage with the news, it’s often at such a surface-level that all students recall is key figures, key words, and a sensationalized headline. Secondly, we don’t contextualize, when context almost always matters the most (Scroll Global News Update, I’m looking at you). Thirdly, we almost never address how discourse surrounding an event changes over time, and we never revisit the news we consume. Finally, we consume current events passively, almost always in the form of lectures, reading articles, or podcasts.
I understand that the efforts to change the state of news engagement at Deerfield are good hearted attempts to at least do something. They also in no way intend to be exhaustive, but rather, attempt to encourage students to follow up on their own. I also do know that students are busy and don’t often do that. At the end of the day, the issue I bring up is still the age-old dilemma of time. I believe, and I believe Deerfield believes, that global citizenship is worth our time. As an institution, Deerfield has at least some authority over our time. We should exercise that authority in our classrooms, instead of giving in to the busyness of our lives. Even if this means we don’t get through Unit 4 of the AP curriculum.
If empowering us to be truly informed global citizens is Deerfield’s goal, then we should expect to make sacrifices. We should expect to prioritize consistent, active, properly contextualized discussions and debates. We should expect that those necessary discussions displace other content. We should expect that those discussions will take time and patience to build. We should expect that sometimes, students need help understanding historical context that is convoluted enough it could be a year-long history course by itself. We should expect that real world answers to ongoing conflict and controversies are never conclusive or singular, and are always developing. We should expect that politics, and the world, are difficult to understand. We should expect that a lot of the time we are ignorant, and though ignorance shouldn’t be criminalized in classrooms, there will be pressure on us, as students, to have a good idea of what the world looks like beyond our campus and hometown. We should not only expect to, but also act, to significantly restructure the way we interact with current events.