For one of the projects the JMC School is working on here my colleagues and I were asked to come up with three things we think it’s important for our students to know when they graduate. It took some pondering, but here’s what I came up with:

1. Our students need to be able, when presented with a new, novel or obscure subject, to quickly and effectively research their way to the information they need to understand and analyze it.

2. When presented with a new subject, or when confronted by new information on a topic (especially if that information is in some way misleading), they need the tools required to think their way to the truth of the matter before them. We live in an age of information overload, and what is needed isn’t information or MORE information – what we need are FILTERS. Our grads need to be walking, talking credibility assessment machines.

3. Our students, when they leave school, need to have the integrity and courage required to stand up in the face of convention and challenge those who would shape our society through deception, misdirection and the suppression of truth.

How’s that?