Beyond Fact versus Opinion: The Educational Value of Judgement by Katie Crabtree

Fact is fact and opinion is fiction. Any well-educated student should be able to tell the difference. This is educational common sense and need not be further investigated. However, according to the 2018 Program for International Student Achievement (PISA) report, only 10% of students in OECD countries were able to distinguish an opinion from fact (Schleicher, 2019). That 90% of all test takers failed to answer a seemingly simple question correctly is alarming. Even worse, the present media environment, where links to intentional disinformation and legitimate journalism can be found on the same Facebook page, makes the stakes that much higher. But here, I shall question the long-enduring and over-simplified dichotomy of fact versus opinion in educational thought. This unchallenged simplification is a symptom of and reason for the exclusion of judgement as both an educable practice and a reason for education. Judgement at its best is a rigorous and well-founded assertion about the world or the way it ought to be. Judgment is what we exercise for that which lies beyond the domain of fact and verifiability. Relegating answers to such questions as mere opinion has a stultifying effect on education and what it could be.

The black and white notion of “fact versus opinion” oversimplifies the nuances of human knowledge.

The black and white notion of “fact versus opinion” oversimplifies the nuances of human knowledge. Yet, there is much educational thought and content that leave the distinction as a simple this or that, regardless of centuries of philosophic debate on the subject. Take for example, this student guide from Ohio State University about picking bibliography sources that urges students to consider the two types of information in written text. There are facts which “are useful to inform or make an argument” and opinions which are “useful to persuade, but careful readers and listeners will notice and demand evidence to back them up” (p. 3-4). The former, with unbiased analysis, yields objective information; note that facts are defined here for their subjective purposes. The latter yields subjective information; “Subjective information can be meant to distort, or it can reflect educated and informed thinking. All opinions are subjective, but some are backed up with facts more than others” (p. 4). Facts presented in this educational guide, and in our common-sense notion, are verifiable and provable, whether through observation or other empirical means, and are not produced by a single mind but can be found by anyone. Opinions, then are the product of a singular person’s mind, whether well-founded or not. This distinction guides much educational thought and practice. Yet, even in this guide, facts and opinion inform each other.

Let us reconsider the PISA question at question. This particular task of the reading literacy portion of the PISA exam for fifteen to sixteen year-olds is aimed at testing students’ ability to “integrate and generate inferences across multiples sources” (Cow’s Milk, 2018)[1]. In the task, students are given two texts about dairy milk—one from a trade association and one from a health reporter. In one question, students are given a table with four statements and are asked to identify whether each statement is fact or opinion based on the content of the texts. The statements “Drinking milk and other dairy products is the best way to lose weight” (referring to the trade association text) and “Recent studies on the healthy benefits of milk are surprising” (referring to the health news article) are both categorized as opinion in the test (Cow’s Milk, 2018). Again, 90% of test takers got this question set wrong by misidentifying two of the four statements. At face-value, this would seem to indicate a failing of education OECD-wide. However, closer inspection reveals a dubious pedagogic practice from an unhelpful dichotomy.

This task is an oversimplification of the exercise of judgment that such statements demand. Let us inspect further the statements referring to the health article: “Recent studies on the healthy benefits of milk are surprising”, classified as opinion, and “Several studies have questioned the bone strengthening power of milk”, which is classified as fact. The key difference is the word “surprising” which indicates a personal reaction to the factual statement’s specificity on the content of those studies—which may be surprising. The problem with this is that the article given, which is meant to be an objective news article, is laden with subjective qualifiers. As art imitates life, so do tests. This might be a reflection of the suspicious stylistic changes to news media that have become de rigueur; in the attention economy, the more bombastic the reporting the more clicks one is likely to get, even when peddling factual information. That is, even sources of “objective” information are always already value-laden. The reason for sharing the results of studies of the health effects of dairy milk might be because they are surprising: the decision to write the article is an opinion. Further, the statement of fact in the test question, which in specificity summarizes what the studies address, might turn out to be untrue. This fact might then be disproven; Is not a fact factual in the extent to which it is true? The text provided to students does not address any potential limitations to the studies and moreover, the results delineated are correlational and not causal. The studies might question the bone strengthening power of milk, but the surprising statistics cited in the text cannot be attributed to be the effect of drinking milk.

A similar reduction is at play with the statement “Drinking milk and other dairy products is the best way to lose weight”, an “opinion” referring to the trade association text. Presumably, it is categorized as opinion because it qualifies milk drinking as the “best” and as such is not verifiable or provable. This, however, could be truthful and supported through facts. Though the text provided to students does not adduce the evidence to support such a claim. And more pernicious than that, this is an opinion that aims to persuade you to buy a product. On one hand, this more than anything demonstrates the murky consumerism that is the architectural bedrock to the media platforms we encounter, where factual information is used to sell products. On the other, this shows how fact and opinion are often within the same statement. As such, an exercise which asks test-takers only to classify stand-alone statements, without the reasons for them, as fact or opinion, is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to evaluating such statements. This overlooks the nuances and subtleties in both factual and subjective statements. A statement of fact can be evaluated along numerous lines likewise can a statement of opinion. A “good” fact or opinion is well-founded and dependent on the remit of whatever paradigm it belongs to, whether that be in an empirical science or the critique of art. Moreover, such a dichotomy precludes the exercise of judgement which intersects the subjective and objective.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we treat opinions as factual and facts as opinion. Indeed in the present “post-truth” climate as it is known, this would be dangerous. This is a concern voiced by education correspondent for the New York Times Dana Goldstein in an episode of The Daily podcast focusing on the poor performance of American students on the PISA question and NEAP (Barbaro & Goldstein, 2019). The hosts gravely discuss the political, social, and economic ramifications of an electorate unable to distinguish fact from opinion; Goldstein ponders:

And we can’t even agree, for example, in this country whether it is Ukraine or Russia that influenced our election in 2016, even though we know it was Russia that meddled — there really is no question on the facts. So when I hear that, you know, only 14 percent of American students are getting this type of question correct, I think it raises big questions not just about our economic competitiveness, or are these kids well-suited to the workforce, but about our country, our future. Are they being prepared to be citizens? And how will that affect all of us? (p. 10)

Yet equally unhelpful is doubling down on the dichotomy of fact and opinion, thereby evading the rigorous exercise of judgement and precluding the statement of normative claims as mere opinion.

In a pithy take down of the fact versus opinion division, John Corvino (2015) demonstrates that when we reason out the differences between facts and opinions, the straightforward distinction falls apart. Corvino suggests that when we are trying to distinguish fact from opinion, it is not really a fact as such, but the statement of a fact; he says, “these are in the mouths of subjects” (par. 3). The significance of this is two-fold.  One could state a fact that turns out to be wrong, thus weakening the criteria of verifiability. (Though of course, one could say that if a fact turns out to be wrong, it was never a fact in the first place). The other significance is that we choose to state facts. Or rather, the finding and sharing of facts is already value-laden. Corvino rejects many common-sense distinctions between fact and opinion, including truth versus not truth (an opinion could be truthful), fact as reality versus opinion as belief (an opinion could also signify reality), facts that describe and opinions that generate norms (casting doubt on the assertion that a normative claim is only the matter of opinion). He concludes by rejecting the concern for the distinction and the deleterious effect of relegating a statement to the domain of “opinion”, something unprovable and therefore unresolvable, and as such untrustworthy. This is not an easy-breezy relativism, but rather a commitment to careful thinking. One which I call for here.

More than the need to cultivate judgement, the exercise, practice, reason for and rhetoric of education is already steeped in judgement, or as the PISA test question might categorize it, opinion. That is, education, what it is or could be, is largely taken for granted. We teach, talk about, make policy, fund and conduct research about it, often without questioning what education is. Mostly we rely on economic means to justify education; it builds skills for the labor force, right? Or we use the idea of citizen and nation-building to defend education; it produces citizens, right? Neither state what education is. In fact, the answer to the question “What is education?” is just one of those questions whose answer cannot be proven or verified. That we educate and why we educate is a testament to our values.

This phrasing is thanks to Paul Standish in his forthcoming essay “Lines of Testimony”, where he postulates teaching as the act of testifying. The educational practice is not one of inputs for desired outputs, but one of sharing what one values, sees, believes in with students. Not in order to give them knowledge, or cultivate skills, though this will undoubtedly be a side effect. Rather, educational activity is the sharing of judgements about what is worthwhile, and this is always open for students to accede, to contest, to reject, or anything in between. This invites students to do more than gain the skills deemed important (like distinguishing fact from opinion), but to share a world; Standish says, “For the child to say things is for him to have a world, a world as opposed to a habitat, and it is to realise what the world is. That he can say things about the world is part of the world’s coming to be” (p. 17). What is more trust-building than pushing past the fact v. opinion divide, into the areas of gray, where we must judge and be judged? Is not that the notion of education in itself, a world-building between generations?

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[1] It should be noted that here I focus on the “Cow’s Milk” question that was in the Feld Test but not included in the Main Survey of PISA; the report states that “The ‘Cow’s Milk’ unit contains a stimulus from a milk producer that touts milk’s ability to help its drinkers lose weight. Some objections were raised with respect to this claim and its focus on body image, even though the unit itself drew attention to the biased nature of the stimulus” (PISA, 2019, p. 68). I focus on this unit because it is specifically discussed by New York Times reporters (Barbaro and Goldstein, 2019) as cited further along in this paper. While this particular item was not in the Main Survey, other units have questions with the same structure and in the PISA report (Schliecher, 2019).  interpreting the results of the 2018 test, this among the unit cited for the interpretation that only 10% of OECD students could distinguish fact from fiction.

Katie Crabtree is a Ph.D. student in the Philosophy of Education at Leeds Trinity University, University of Leeds. Her research attempts to re-imagine liberal arts university education and the meaning of being a student. She focuses on the philosophy of Jean-François Lyotard. Katie holds a M.A. in the Philosophy of Education from UCL Institute of Education, a M.Sc. in Higher Education from the University of Oxford, and a B.S. in Psychology from Grand Valley State University.

References

Barbaro, M. & D. Goldstein. (2019). America’s education problem. The Daily. New York Times. Transcript [PDF]. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/podcasts/the-daily/education.html?showTranscript=1

Corvino, J. (2015). The fact/opinion distinction. The Philosopher’s Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.philosophersmag.com/essays/26-the-fact-opinion-distinction

Cow’s Milk. (2018). PISA Test. Retrieved from https://pisa2018-questions.oecd.org/platform/index.html?user=&domain=REA&unit=R557-CowsMilk&lang=eng-ZZZ [Accessed 24 Jan 2020].

Ohio State University. (nd). Fact or opinion. [Online]. Retrieved from https://ohiostate.pressbooks.pub/choosingsources/chapter/fact-or-opinion/ [Accessed 27 Jan 2020].

PISA. (Oct, 2019). PISA 2018 Released Field Trial and Main Survey New Reading Items. OECD. [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/PISA2018_Released_REA_Items_12112019.pdf

Schliecher, A. (2019). PISA 2018: Insights and Interpretations. OECD. [PDF]. Retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA%202018%20Insights%20and%20Interpretations%20FINAL%20PDF.pdf

Standish, P. (forthcoming). Lines of testimony. Journal of the Philosophy of Education.