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Education & Information

Education & Information

Film shown to high schoolers in 1948 exposes the tactics of propaganda still relevant today

"What are 'glittering generalities?'"

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Propaganda exposed in 1948 film shown to highs schoolers

Propaganda is a word we often hear thrown around when someone says something we don't agree with. It doesn't matter if what's being said is factually true or not. The word has been so overused that people may not recognize actual propaganda when they see it. Americans aren't well versed in recognizing propaganda outside of the brief disclaimer that other countries used propaganda during wartime.

There's not much of a deep dive on the topic in schools but at one point in history, it was completely normal for high schoolers to be taught how to spot propaganda. In the 40s, juniors and seniors in high school were required to learn about how propaganda mixes language and images to persuade people to believe one thing over another even if it wasn't true. The goal for propaganda was to get people emotionally invested in whatever was being pushed so they'd be more likely to trust what they were hearing.

America was so invested in teaching about the pitfalls of propaganda that they put together a video explaining different ways to recognize it. This was designed to come in handy for the deluge of information coming out about WWII at the time and eventually the Cold War. People needed to be able to critically pick apart what they were reading, seeing and hearing so they could best decipher the truth.

Oak Ridge High School Library | Free Photo - rawpixelwww.rawpixel.com

While America is not currently at war, learning to decipher propaganda is still relevant today, especially given how quickly information moves nowadays. In the 1948 film sold to high schools across the country, an older man shares with a high school boy ways to identify propaganda by first listing some of the techniques.

The techniques of propaganda listed are glittering generalities, transfer, name-calling, card-stacking, testimonial, plain folks, and bandwagon. They then go through each technique to breakdown what they look like in practice. Many of the techniques listed may be easily identifiable in modern American politics and advertisements.

grayscale photography of children sitting inside room Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

Examples given for glittering generalities are "good government" and "real American" used in different campaigns. But the faux politician asks the boy what is "good government" and is it the same as what the mayor considers to be "good government." This gets the young man's wheels turning. In his example for card-stacking he plays a recording where the mayoral candidate blames a water issue on the current mayor.

"That's what we call card-stacking. Cooper was mayor when the pumping station broke down but it was the man in office before him who allowed it to get into such a rundown condition and it finally gave way before he could get anything done," the man explains.

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The boy then clarifies the information he is hearing, "and card-stacking is choosing some facts and leaving out others and arranging them to suit your purpose."

Once the teen understands some of the basic propaganda techniques, he and the man take another look at a campaign film they've previously watched, allowing the boy a chance to identify the types of propaganda techniques used.

"You'll find that the purpose of most propaganda is to persuade people to believe something, to do something or to buy something," the man says before later adding, "whenever you're tracking down propaganda, get as many different points of view as you can."

Gathering as much factual information as you can from multiple different points of view and different sources is important for any sort of research, but it's especially important when the goal is to sell you something or win your vote. Showing a film like this one in high school may be helpful in ensuring people continue to be able to recognize the persuasive techniques used in political and marketing ads to encourage critical thinking and informed decision-making.

"I think I understand," the boy says. "To know whether propaganda is good or not, whether it's true or not, I should know the purpose, recognize the technique, get the facts and judge the purpose and technique by the facts."

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Family

Parents are sharing the things they keep repeating to their kids who just never listen

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A parent disciplines his child.

Parenting can seem a lot like parroting. You repeat the same demands over and over again. “Get in the car,” “Put on your shoes,” “Stop putting your finger in the light socket “ …the list goes on and on. As parents, we don’t want to sound like a nag; we’d like them to listen the first time, but sometimes it seems impossible. No parent is perfect and nor is any child, so the struggle continues.

Just imagine a blissful morning where you only have to say the following phrases just once:

“Wake up.”

“Put on your clothes.”

“Finish your breakfast.”

"Brush your teeth.”

“Grab your backpack.”

“Get in the car."

Or, even better, what if we never had to say those phrases in the first place? Sadly, this will never happen for 99% of all parents, but the good news is that you’re not alone.

Adam Rittenberg, senior writer for college football at ESPN, asked his followers on X what they have to tell their kids incessantly and he got back a list that every parent will understand.

So, how do we get our children to listen the first time? Is it even possible? Erica Reischer Ph.D. has some tips in Psychology Today that can help parents get on the right track. One of the most important is to make sure to cultivate the habit of paying attention.

“Because if you tend to ask again and again (and again), and then either give up and do it yourself—or resort to yelling—you may be unintentionally teaching your kids that you can be ignored until you either give up (you didn’t really mean it) or you yell (now you mean it),” Reischer writes.

She also said to be sure to let them know the consequences of not listening.

“Fair warning is critical because if children know in advance what the consequences will be for breaking a rule or ignoring a request, then they are making a choice about their behavior: whether they are going to follow the rule, or break the rule and bear the consequences. There are no surprises,” Reischer says.

It’s also important that parents follow through with any threats or else they will have no teeth. If you count to three to get the child to listen and after finishing the count there aren’t any consequences, they’ll eventually stop listening. But if you follow through every time, they will start paying attention very quickly.

There’s another great piece of parenting advice that seems to apply to just about every situation: “What you permit, you teach.” Whatever behaviors we allow our children to do, whether we like them or not, we reinforce.

Parenting is tough, but as the tweet thread above shows, we’re not in it alone. Parents from all walks of life have the same struggles because every kid seems to be blessed with the miracle of selective hearing. Unless, of course, you ask if they want ice cream, then they’re all ears.

This article originally appeared three years ago.

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Education & Information

Coroner's warning to teens and parents about running away has kids thinking twice after viral video

"I'm asking you to be so nosey that is is almost annoying."

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Coroner warns teens and parents about concerning trend

As a parent there is nothing quite as terrifying as not knowing where your child is. It doesn't matter if they're 30 or 3, if you don't know that they're safe your mind doesn't rest. Most parents experience this level of panic only briefly when a little one escapes eyesight in a public place but far too many parents know the prolonged feeling of not knowing the whereabouts of their child.

Richland County Coroner, Naida Rutherford is taking to social media to give teens and their parents a serious warning to keep them from ending up on her table. Her plea came shortly after finishing a press conference about the missing 13-year-old Ka'Niyah Baker who was recently found deceased. The teen left her home to meet up with two other teen girls and was never heard from again.

"You may be running away with somebody who has undiagnosed mental illness with violent homicidal tendencies. You don't know enough to know what the hell you don't know," Rutherford says passionately to her live stream audience.

boy wearing white shirt and black shorts carrying backpack standing on black concrete road between vehicles and trees during daytime Photo by Jesús Rodríguez on Unsplash

While Ka'Niyah was reported as a runaway, she's not alone. 93% of children reported missing are runaways, and in 2023 the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that over 300 of the cases were children in child protective custody, like Ka'Niyah. Much of the time, teens have no idea what they're running towards and since their brains aren't fully developed, they impulsively leave.

This impulsivity can kick in for a number of reasons that cause teens to believe their life would be better elsewhere. According to National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, kids runaway due to bullying, family conflict, mental health issues, lack of acceptance at home, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. While kids in foster care may be running away to get back to their parents. But many children have no real concept of what can happen to them when they leave home, especially if they think they're leaving with other teens or internet friends they think they can trust.

man in black jacket and black backpack walking on train rail during daytime Photo by Oskar Smethurst on Unsplash

In Rutherford's plea, she addresses the increased risk of sex trafficking, informing teens that grown men should not be interested in children sexually. She explains that sex trafficking doesn't only happen in large cities as teens have been trafficked in her small town in South Carolina and often teens are too embarrassed to go home. But she has a message to parents on how to keep their children safe.

"Parents. I'm addressing you right here and right now. Come on in. Be nosey. Know who their friends are. Know who they're talking to. You pay the cell phone bill, snoop. I'm asking you to be so nosey that it is almost annoying and show them the story of Ka'Niyah Baker," the county coroner says.

Rutherford has been inundated with positive responses to her candid video which she tells News 19 WLTX, the comments have proven there's a community still out there wanting to keep children safe. She admits that it will take a village mindset to ensure the safety of children and she's not alone in her thinking.


Investigator J.P. Smith from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department (RCSD) Missing Persons Unit tells ABC 4 News that protecting children is not solely the parents' job as it requires community effort. He tells the news outlet, “when you see something, say something. You’re not bothering us—we want to know why that child is out at one in the morning. Don’t hesitate to call, the sooner the better.”

The heartbreaking story of Ka'Niyah won't make parents feel warm and fuzzy but the compassionate warnings from public officials provides much needed information to families. Continue to hold your children tightly, together, we can be the village for children in our communities.

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Education

People think Gen Z lacks resilience because they've been 'coddled.' Let's unpack that myth.

It's not that Gen Z hasn't seen enough. They've actually seen too much.

Photo credit: Canva

Gen Z was raised in an entirely different world.

As a parent of three Gen Z kids, I’ve spent lots of time up close with today’s teens and young adults. Looking at my kids and their Gen Z peers (ranging from age 13 to 28), I’ve noticed where the stereotypes of their generation hit the mark and where they miss. Some stereotypes are just typical complaints that older generations always have of "young people these days," but there's one barb that Gen Xers and boomers frequently throw out that I think is way off: Gen Zers lack resilience because they've been coddled and protected from the harsh realities of life.

If we use "the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties" as a working definition of "resilience," I find Gen Z to be a mixed bag. Some of them show great resilience, some don't. A 4,000-person survey from Cigna Group found that Gen Z struggles with mental health more than older generations do, however, and child psychologist Stuart Lustig calls Gen Z "the loneliest, least resilient demographic alive today." Maybe that's true. But is it really because they've been coddled?

It's not that Gen Z hasn't seen enough. They've actually seen too much.

Some argue that the “participation trophies” and “trigger warnings” have made young people unable to handle hard things. Others argue that parents are too easy on their children. I'll concede that some Gen X parents swung the pendulum too far from their neglected childhoods, becoming "helicopter parents" who resisted allowing their kids to experience the risks, failures and disappointments that ultimately build resilience. But the idea that Gen Z as a whole has been "coddled"—overly sheltered from the harsh realities of life? That one is strange to me.

These are kids who have done active shooter drills in their classrooms their entire childhoods, and not just as a “this is something that could happen” but as a “this actually does happen with alarming regularity.” Boomer and older Gen Xers may have hid under their desks in Cold War bomb drills, but no bombs were actually ever dropped in the U.S. Gen Zers have seen the aftermath of their peers being murdered in classrooms over and over again.

What Gen Z has been exposed to is mind-boggling compared to what their parents saw ask kids, thanks to being the first generation to never know a world without the internet. Where Gen X had access to a daily newspaper and a half hour of nightly world news, Gen Z has been subjected to constant sensationalized news streams on cable TV and the internet 24/7. But it's not just the vast amount of news. Thanks to smartphone cameras and social media, today's teens and young adults have also borne witness to scenes of violence, tragedy, and trauma unfolding in real-time, on-the-ground, all around the world.

five young adults standing looking at their phonesGen Z is the first full "digital native" generation.Photo credit: Canva

Where boomers and Gen X might have seen someone's dad's Playboys, Gen Z has grown up with devices that contain disturbing, hardcore pornography. Even if they haven't accessed or tripped across explicit content themselves, it's very likely that someone in their peer group has shown them pornography that kids in previous generations would never have been able to access. And it's happening at younger and younger ages.

There's no precedent for the world Gen Z grew up in

There's anxiety that comes along with all of this exposure, even for full-grown adults who have a foundation of a simpler time to reflect back on. Gen Z never had a simpler time. They were born into the ocean of anxiety. Then they got hit by a once-in-a-century (hopefully) global pandemic, adding another layer of uncertainty to the mix.

As a whole, Gen Z hasn’t been sheltered from the harsh realities of the world; it's been bombarded by them in ways that previous generations simply weren’t during their youth. Humans—even children—have experienced hard things things for millennia and evolved to build resilience to life's challenges. What humans haven't experienced until now is having an overload of information and tragic news and disturbing content from around the world available at their fingertips 24/7. There's simply no precedent for raising kids in this world, so raising Gen Z has been one big collective experiment.

Even if conscientious parents have done their best to protect their kids from its pitfalls, the internet is not a separate thing from our lives like it was in its early days. Gen Z has grown up in a digitally connected world. Even parents who manage to hold off on phones or other internet-enabled devices longer than most eventually had to give because it's become nearly impossible to be an active participant in society without the internet. Those of us who grew up in a non-digital world can attest to how much the internet has changed our lives in various, often drastic, ways. Gen Z was born into that world, and despite being "digital natives" are not immune to the anxiety and overwhelm that comes with it.

Maybe we need to rethink what resilience looks like for the "digital native" generations

All of this means that resilience for Gen Z may look different than it did for us. Their young brains have been taxed in ways ours were not. They've had to process so much more, filter so much more, learn how to navigate so much more than we did. I actually think they're doing pretty well, all things considered. They may struggle with mental health a bit more than previous generations, but they're also so much more aware of it and willing to get help with it. They may not stay in jobs with unhealthy work environments and poor work-life balance, but that doesn't mean they're soft—quite the opposite, in fact.

I'm not saying Gen Z couldn't use some good old-fashioned life lessons about picking themselves up and dusting themselves off. But I do think we need to acknowledge that being the first internet-enabled generation has affected them in ways we are just beginning to grasp, and that adjusting our expectations of resilience and reevaluating what resilience looks like for them might be in order.

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