Learning to Read the News Canadian high schools should do far more to teach students how to make sense of what they read online. Many schools already run computer classes and even some digital-citizenship lessons, so why not add a proper course in judging online information? A teenager who can analyse a poem should also be able to tell a trustworthy news report from a cleverly disguised advertisement. The reasoning is simple: today's students spend hours a day scrolling through posts, yet few have ever been shown how to check whether any of it is true, so they pass along rumours without a second thought, and to protect themselves and think clearly, high school students need to learn how to weigh online sources.

I raised this with a school department head, and he said it would smack of chasing trends: "Our job is to give students a solid grounding in literature and history, not to build a lesson around whatever happens to be going viral this week." But shouldn't every thoughtful citizen be able to question what a screen puts in front of them, and what is so trend-driven about learning to think for yourself?