Doubt as a compass: 'Doubt and Debate' starts in Italian schools

There are words that more often than not carry inherently negative meanings in the common vernacular. 'Doubt' can certainly be one of them. Yet, in the world that runs fast on the digital tarmac of algorithms, doubting is once again considered in some ways an act of survival.

Next Monday, 150,000 Italian students, followed by 4,400 teachers, will start doing it together: "Doubt and Debate", the new international project of the Observatory for Independent Thinking, conceived by Andrea Ceccherini with the support of Tim and a constellation of media partners including Il Sole 24 Ore, Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, Rai, Mediaset, CNN, New York Times, and El País, will officially start. "With Doubt and Debate," Ceccherini explained, "we aim to make the younger generations increasingly capable of developing their own critical, free and independent thinking, which can protect them from the increasingly devious attempts of propaganda and manipulation.

The project, the result of two years of experimentation, proposes a minimum of twenty lessons in tech and media literacy (10 for each of the two areas). It will involve 6,000 classes experimentally this year and, Ceccherini specifies, 'will run alongside the "Quotidiano in classe", the Observatory's historic project. Digital and media literacy, but also civic education for the 21st century. Students will learn not only how "the web works, this magic box in which they spend many hours of the day, without however knowing the rules that govern it", but also how to distinguish "true news from false news" and "facts from opinions". All this playing on the same ground as the children: same codes, same language and means, but content produced by a certified information world that can and must distinguish itself from the undergrowth of dispensers of fake information, when not actually polluted. At a time when public debate oscillates between eco-chambers and algorithmic rages, Doubt and Debate restores to the school a role of democratic presidium. The platform - accessible free of charge to all secondary schools - will offer multimedia content, video news analysed from different perspectives (political, economic, cultural), and masterclasses for teachers with international information figures. The method is that of the thinking routines, a mental training in confrontation, to teach that the world is not made up of certainties but of points of view, and that truth is not a link to click, but a path to follow and a goal to strive for. In this gymnasium of thought to which the students of the upper secondary schools participating in the project will be subjected in twenty lessons, the most pressing contemporary issues will find their place: the impact of artificial intelligence and its ethical drifts; the challenge of climate and sustainability in an interconnected economy; the faults of a geopolitics in continuous change; the conflicts and international crises that cross our daily chronicles. But also the power of digital media, the threat of disinformation, the fragility of mental health in hyper-connectedness, new forms of youth work and activism, and the value of diversity, equity and inclusion as the lintels of a global citizenship. In short, an attempt to rewrite the contract between school and society. Because the generation that has grown up with AI and social media risks being the most informed and, paradoxically, the least aware.