Last Wednesday night marked the Newton Youth Commission’s eighth monthly meeting and the debut of Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan’s Digital Citizenship Academy in Newton. According to Meghan Murtagh,the assistant director of Youth Services, the Youth Commission is a collective of Mayor-appointed youth and adults that meets monthly to discuss community needs.
The Civic Online Reasoning program, sponsored by Stanford University and presented at the last meeting, was developed to educate young people about how to evaluate online information, and it has achieved some good results. According to District Attorney Ryan, students who have gone through the program have become “80% better at detecting the truth,” and that’s probably true!
Accordingly, last Wednesday’s meeting saw young people learn just a little bit more about digital and written literacy, as well as glean an insight into the office of Middlesex County’s D.A.
Not surprisingly, overseeing the entire legal operation of 54 of Middlesex cities and towns is a pretty tall task. Middlesex is bigger than eleven states in the country; and in the words of D.A. Ryan, crime here “can live in a different place, look a different way, and drive a different car.”
The county makes for an excellent point of legal research – there being so many diverse forms of crime. Each kind is difficult to categorize and keep track of if you do not know the facts.
And the facts, said D.A. Ryan, are something that “people just don’t seem to agree on.” The D.A. continued, “if the facts are inaccurate, actions resulting from those facts will also be inaccurate, which can present some significant problems.”
Solving those problems is an important goal, and hence Wednesday’s large attendance – many more students than just those on the Youth Commission. Those attending that night examined a single teaching scenario and three sources of information – all for the purpose of exercising critical thinking.
The question in the scenario was, “Should school be held on Saturdays?” and immediately there were more questions, asked by the D.A — “how would somebody find out if that is a good idea?” Said students, “Well, people could look at similar schools with six-day weeks”, or “ask friends what they think,” or even “ask around the community for the pros and cons of the situation.”
In this scenario, some theoretical solutions already existed and were provided in the form of community sources. Source A was, familiarly, a Twitter post, made by a hypothetical organization called “Project for More Learning,” and apparently organized by lunch ladies. The post, created by school staff, seemed to make some good points.
“It’s valuable, I think, this information,” said a student, “because if we’d really reduce the amount of information that learners forget by 50% after implementing this measure, it would definitely help our schools overall.”
Added another attendee, “I agree that the measure has the potential to improve schools, but I’m just not sure it’s guaranteed. Still, I do think that Newton should at least try the six-day schedule for some time.”
Both students were overruled, of course, because 75% of the meeting’s attendees heard the proposition and “immediately went ‘nope.’” But it was worth humoring the idea and the argument.
District Attorney Ryan asked the assembly about this argument. “What is it, exactly? What qualifications do the people making it have?”
“They’re lunch ladies,” answered a student. That is an important fact because, as D.A. Ryan put it, “you want to look into the motives and thoughts of the people that you put faith in.” And, just reading things from top to bottom, highlighting things here and there as we were taught is, as a strategy, “completely wrong.”
Instead, said D.A. Ryan, “we need to thoroughly research details about sources and find the heavily biased think tanks hiding out there.” She said that bias is just about everywhere, and noticing it is crucial. Though it’d be time saving to have impartial sources to lean on, everyone has a little grain of bias.
“Think of an entertainment writer who covers a festival, has a nice time, and is treated very warmly by the people there,” she said. “Chances are they’ll write a likewise warm and fuzzy article, even if the performance wasn’t that good.”
It’s impossible to not have feelings about a subject, and that’s just human nature. D.A. Ryan was also able to speak about life as a lawyer, and the District Attorney described a few aspects of her work at the office, for instance, representing the government in criminal cases and assessing different legal situations that concern local communities.
One example of a local concern is protecting children from harm. For example, to prevent injuries sustained by kids around swimming pools and bodies of water, the D.A. office has “partnered with pool companies, and spent significant time with little kids, teaching them swimming safety.”
Reportedly, Middlesex has seen a reduction in child drownings as a result. Prevention is a key part of any legal system that protects the people. Ours is not perfect, but it’s the best system that D.A. Ryan has ever found – and that’s compared to much of progressive Europe.
Teaching folks about finding credible information is just one small thing we can do to help make our legal system become even better. Said assistant D.A. Madeleine Gearan, “finding credible information makes us more credible.”
Andrey Sarkanich is a sophomore at Newton North High School.