High School Takes on Misinformation Crisis with Educational Event

Under the tall steel-beamed ceiling of York School Library in Monterey, junior Esther Spaulding peered over her peers’ shoulders as they tackled a challenging puzzle: determining what’s fact and what’s fiction in today’s news media.

Spaulding, alongside co-editor Sofia Fejia-Contreras of the York School newspaper, led a “Misinformation Buster” activity as part of a broader “Misinformation Day” event held last Friday. The initiative aimed to equip students and educators with critical tools to navigate today’s complex information landscape.

“We’re in a very difficult time of misinformation in this country and the world,” explained Fejia-Contreras. “We’re trying to give students and educators the resources to battle that and to not let themselves be fooled by what the world is giving them.”

Spaulding noted how easily people can fall prey to false information, particularly in the social media era. “The first instinct is always to assume it’s true, but that’s what we’re trying to break,” she said.

The event featured presentations by media literacy experts, including Nolan Higdon, a political analyst, author, and lecturer at UC Santa Cruz who specializes in critical media studies. Higdon emphasized that while misinformation isn’t new, each technological advancement brings fresh challenges.

“It’s always been a plague for humans because one of the coolest things about being humans is we can imagine and create,” Higdon explained. “But it also means we can imagine and create total nonsense.”

Higdon highlighted the democratic implications of widespread misinformation. “Democracies are predicated on the idea that people use the truth to make decisions,” he said. However, he warned that when “a handful of corporations control the flow of information,” the landscape becomes “skewed toward making money, not informing people,” resulting in “a bad media and a civically illiterate public.”

Dan Gurska, a humanities teacher at York School, helped organize the event in collaboration with the Media Literacy Coalition and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. He believes the initiative addresses a critical gap in modern education systems struggling to keep pace with rapidly evolving information technologies.

“These students have an inundation of information,” Gurska observed. He expressed concern that in today’s digital environment, where content is curated by profit-driven algorithms, truth often becomes obscured. “When you inundate a kid on TikTok with 30 different falsehoods, that inundation makes it more subtle in nature. People get caught up and swept away in the flood of information.”

While Gurska reminisced about his younger days when libraries were his primary “deluge of information,” he’s not opposed to technology. Instead, he advocates for educational systems that evolve alongside technological advancements.

The event attracted students and teachers from across Monterey County, who participated in various hands-on activities designed to develop critical thinking skills when consuming media. As participants worked through fake-news puzzles, Gurska noted that events like “Misinformation Day” signal growing recognition of the challenges posed by what he calls “the misinformation age.”

“People are finally investing in it,” he remarked, expressing cautious optimism about this educational shift.

The York School initiative represents part of a broader national movement to integrate media literacy into education. As social media platforms and artificial intelligence continue to transform how information is created and consumed, educators are increasingly recognizing the need to adapt their teaching approaches.

By bringing together students, teachers, and experts for collaborative learning, York School’s “Misinformation Day” offered a promising model for how educational institutions might prepare young people to become more discerning consumers of information in an increasingly complex digital landscape.