What has happened to the internet since Brexit and the election of Trump? The number of lies to be found is amazing. It's as if we all have permission now to write any old nonsense and people will believe it. The misinformation applies not just to US and UK politics but to news from Scotland.
The first big lie I noticed was about the Scottish test scores in Maths and English in the international PISA tests. It's claimed school attainment levels are dropping 'like a stone' and Scotland has been 'overtaken' by England. This isn't borne out by the actual figures. The PISA tests are notoriously unreliable. For one thing, the tests don't start from a level playing field: we have schools in different countries with high levels of academic selection up against neighbourhood comprehensive schools. Countries can - and do - fix their test scores by carefully selecting their candidates. Coaching for the tests is rife in some countries. It's got so bad that US schools totally ignore PISA (in which their schools always do badly) and point to their own internal assessment methods as a better guide to the progress of their young people. Scotland's scores have hardly moved in the last 20 years. England's candidates have moved up in the tables and I'd really like to know if they've used any of the methods I've described above to achieve that improvement.
Yesterday, a blog told me - honestly! - that it is Nicola Sturgeon's intention to make Scotland a Gaelic-speaking country. I'd love to know how that's to be done. I'd also like to see where the SNP has a mandate to do that or has even hinted at doing that in its literature. It all seems to point to indignation (fuelled by ignorance) about the Gaelic Language Act of 2005. You don't remember 2005? I do: Scotland was governed by a Labour-LibDem coalition at the time and that was the government which passed the Act. The SNP, I'm sorry to say, took no interest in Gaelic till it came to power in 2007 and it then had to be lobbied relentlessly before it espoused the Gaelic cause. If you don't like the idea of public bodies having to have a Gaelic Plan, blame the right group of politicians. As for a plan for Gaelic to take over the country, show me!
Today I came across my favourite lie so far. The Scotsman newspaper has published findings by an academic that teenagers in Scotland are failing to reach the correct 'reading age.' A Facebook friend has pointed out that the tests of literacy used in Scottish schools (as in many other countries) only measure reading and writing ability up to the age of 12. A reading age of 12 means that a young person is 'functionally literate.' That means, s/he can read and write well enough to be considered to be working at an adult level. In that respect, Scotland is doing pretty well - see the PISA tables. According to the Scotsman's correspondents, the SNP is deliberately 'dumbing down' the population so that we will vote for independence. I'm amazed that the 50,000 teachers employed in Scottish schools have been so quietly recruited to assist in this fiendish plan and parents, some of whom will be anti-independence, have allowed this to happen.
Of course, most of us would say we're not likely to be fooled by this stuff. Some of us don't read these daft ideas anyway. Some of us have learned not to believe anything that comes from a right-wing blog or newspaper. But at the back of my mind is the word disrespectful. I think that blogs and newspapers that put out these ideas are disrespectful of people in Scotland who want the best for themselves and their families, regardless of whether they are Unionists or independence voters. Whatever our differences, we all want to know the real issues, not the alternative facts put out by Internet trolls who couldn't tell the truth if their lives depended on it.
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