The Role of Education in Overcoming the Negative Information Impacts Under the Post-True Era (Review Article)

The peculiarities of the post-truth interpretation, its key political manifestations and its impact on modern global society have been analyzed. It is asserted about the importance of education in combating the negative effects of post-truth political practice. It is argued that the key mechanism for counteracting the spread of post-truth practices in the information sphere, reducing its destructive impact is the formation of the need of citizens to combat misinformation and strengthen their ability to process, including decode, the information, to separate its useful components from harmful ones. It has been found that researchers of the problems caused by the emergence of the post-truth phenomenon propose to consider them within four approaches, each of which uses different options to analyze the challenges posed by thinking within the paradigm of post-truth. It is about such approaches related to the analysis of ways of knowing: not knowing how to know; fallible ways of knowing; not caring about truth (enough) and disagreeing about how to know. Within each approach, researchers propose: (a) an explanation of how people’s ways of knowing can influence trends in the post-truth phenomenon in general, (b) an analysis of how education might aggravate this problem and (c) suggestions on how education can mitigate the problem. It is emphasized that the phenomenon of post-truth arises at the intersection of different contexts, it is, therefore, necessary to look for ways and develop educational guidelines to address social and political issues, and encourage public participation that will provide individuals with political practices that empirically challenge the post-truth thesis. It is determined the necessity for closer cooperation between politicians, social workers, scholars and educators to develop interdisciplinary guidelines that can respond to the challenges of the post-truth era, contribute to the improvement of thinking about the problems that exist in the post-truth world.