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You are here: Home / In English / The word of the week is fact checking.

The word of the week is fact checking.

9.12.2014

How has the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty changed in the last 20 years? Would you say it’s doubled, remained the same, or dropped in half? Ola Rosling posed this question in Online Educa, because he wanted to find out if the participants viewed the world based on facts or illusions. It turns out that we education professionals are nearly as well-informed as chimpanzees. Rosling demonstrated that we believe development in general is far darker than statistics show it to be. Poverty has been halved, women’s education has increased, and natural disasters have been less devastating, as the Gapminder statistics show. Rosling demolished three common misconceptions. Contrary to what people think, most things are in fact better now than in the past. Prosperity does not lead to social reform; social reform leads to prosperity. And income inequality is not actually increasing; rather, the number of middle-income earners is growing. Whom we should blame for the misconceptions: parents, media, or teachers? At least we instructors should convey an evidence-based world view, which means we need to do our own fact checking.

Filed Under: In English, In English, Word of the Week, Word of the Week

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