We Tell Our Children: Don't Talk to Strangers. But What to Do About the Strangers Paid to Talk to Our Children?

Help your child to forge a skepticism sword

We tell our kids not to talk to strangers, but strangers are paid to talk to them every day for hours on end.

The strangers work in P.R., propaganda, and marketing materials production. Their job is to commandeer the consciousness of others, and convince those others to buy products, accept policies,and on-board claims as facts.

They do not care if the products are crap. They do not care if the premise of one of their professional claims is as weakly connected to the conclusion, as this automobile is connected to the likelihood of anyone driving it away anytime soon.

Everywhere a young person looks, he or she will see, hear and feel the nudges of those paid to pretzel truth to make desirable in the minds of people, those policies and products their clients prefer and produce.

The nudges appear on billboards, and websites, in curricula, on the back of cereal boxes, and in scripts when creators are paid to “place” products and ideologies.

The “messaging” gushes forth from the gobs of influencers, political candidates, and from the mouths of highly paid suits behind "news" desks, definitely not doing journalism, but yapping away anyway, and doing everything in their semiotic power to convince listeners they are the real thing.

If we parents don’t explicitly teach our kids how to sort incoming claims as valid, invalid, or unknown, we are not giving them the tools they need to foil a white van consciousness kidnapping.

Some people avoid teaching these lessons because they themselves were not taught and never developed a skeptical practice.

I had a public school education. Supposedly some of these schools were “great” schools. I went to a private college. Supposedly it was a “great” college. I emerged without possessing a “valid” definition of skepticism, let alone the tools to effectively practice the discipline. I had to teach myself. The impression I’m getting from those passing through educational institutions now, is that the situation has not gotten better, unless you’re taking classes in philosophy, something rarely offered in high school or emphasized in college.

Perhaps others resist taking the time to teach kids how to bring skeptical discipline to the table because it doesn’t feel good to have to explain to our kids that boatloads of professional liars walk among us, or focus on that reality ourselves.

The other possible reasons might be worry that a kid who already spends a colossal amount of time at a school, will see efforts to tutor them in this area as “more schoolwork”.

But most kids and teenagers love to argue, and inviting them to learn how to argue better, and how not be taken in or bulldozed by bad arguments others make, tends to appeal to them.

For every age and stage there are materials out there to help parents engage with their kids on this topic, everything from picture books and games to actual curricula.

Our family used “A Workbook for Arguments: A Complete Course in Critical Thinking” to explore and teach claim evaluation to our then-fourteen-year old.

These titles from Classical Academic Press also look potentially useful, though I don’t have first-hand experience with them.

And here’s a very popular book that we have around the house, the topic of which young people who might be unmoved by the goal of “seeing clearly” might be more inclined to peruse because it’s essentially a handbook for how to win an argument.

At this point in my life, I have to confess: I consider the “art of persuasion” more dark art than light-producing skill, so I now find “Thank You for Arguing’s” focus on the art of persuasion relatively problematic. Persuasion can be deployed to further the most heinous goals as well as those harmless or neutral. It’s the very “art” deployed by the marketer, PR flack, propagandist strangers talking to our children.

Yes, I know, yet here I am, trying to “persuade” you with the paragraphs I’ve written, that teaching kids and young adults skeptical method might be important and valuable to them.

What I’m trying to say is that if you decide to set a goal of helping someone in your life forge a skeptical sword to cut through self and other generated bullshit for their own defense in a world full of weaponized communication, just know that some materials which explore the topic of argument are focused primarily on learning how to deploy arguments for the sake of “winning”, rather than developing knowledge. The beauty of teaching skeptical method, separately from any persuasive techique is that the goal of skepticism’s application is clarity and clarity alone.

As the propaganda bombs fall around us (many urging support for the use of extremely real ones against extremely real people in far away places) I know my kids are in a better place than I was at their age, because we took the time to explicitly focus on teaching skeptical practice. It ain’t a particularly sophisticated version. but they have their blades. The work we put in engraved those blades with important questions like: “How would I know if I was wrong?” and “Does that premise match that conclusion?” It’ll be up to them to sharpen them further and remember to bring them with them wherever they go.