The infamous quote that forms the title of this chapter was uttered on British television on 3 June 2016 by a member of parliament and leading figure in politics, Michael Gove MP. Mr Gove had been secretary of state for education from 2010 to 2014 and was responsible for many reforms during his tenure, including what was later dubbed the ‘knowledge turn’ in education: a refocus on the importance of teaching discernible facts. The occasion was an interview on Sky News with presenter Faisal Islam in the run-up to the Brexit referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union (EU). His outburst was in response to the challenge that economic experts had unilaterally warned against leaving the EU; Mr Gove was a key figure in the Leave campaign. His response was to suggest that ‘the people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best’ (Sky News, 2016). What is more surprising looking back on this debate is the reaction from the live studio audience. Rather than recoiling in horror at the idea that a leading national figure would disparage the advice of experts in their field, they cheered him loudly. It was, to me, a live affirmation of a trend towards populist politics that was spreading across the UK, the USA and much of Europe. Politicians were saying what people wanted to hear, and both they and their audiences seemed oblivious to any voice of reason from experts. Opinions, whether or not they hold up against the available evidence, were given equal billing as claims for truth. So-called ‘experts’ were painted as being out of touch by an increasingly opportunistic media and political class.

It was not just economic forecasts that were rubbished by the media. Social media posts began to question basic scientific facts that had been proved long ago by meticulous scientific investigation. The most obvious of these which has come into question again in the twenty-first century is that the shape of the Earth is a sphere;1 unlike some voices who try to convince us otherwise, the Earth is not flat.

Human civilisations have long questioned the shape of the Earth. The poet Homer, in c. eighth century BC, writes about a flat Earth, a view shared by many of the early Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Chinese civilisations. A popular myth is that belief in a flat Earth was maintained until only the last few hundred years when the enlightened Europeans were able to ‘prove’ it for the benefit of the rest of the world. The story goes that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) was advised not to sail west out of Portugal to reach wealthy Cathay in the Far East (modern-day Northern China) as he risked falling off the end of the Earth. In fact, this myth was created by the author Washington Irving in his 1828 biography of Columbus. The myth perpetuates that it was not until Ferdinand Magellan’s ship Victoria circumnavigated the world from 1519 to 1522 that there was final proof that the Earth was, indeed, a globe. This is simply not true; it is a Eurocentric spin on history. The chances are that Columbus was well aware of the shape of the Earth. This retelling of history to create a positive European narrative happens quite a lot it seems.

The ancient Greeks were some of the first to study ‘geodesy’: the size, shape, position and gravitational effects of the Earth in space. Followers of the work of Pythagoras, in the sixth century BC, observed that the moon and the sun were spheres and that the Earth was therefore likely to follow the same shape, and this would give us day and night – an idea supported by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. There were some who thought that the Earth stood still and the heavens rotated, but it was the work of Eratosthenes in the third century BC that really pushed on the science of geodesy. He calculated the circumference of the Earth to remarkable accuracy. Exact details seem to vary, but according to an article published in the journal Science (King-Hele, 1976), Eratosthenes was working in Aswan in modern-day Egypt and identified that the sun was directly overhead at midsummer, shining right down a vertically dug well. Almost due north of there, at Alexandria, he used a stick to identify that the sun was 7.2 degrees away from the vertical at the same time. He measured the distance between the two places by timing how long it took a camel to walk between them and using its average pace to calculate the distance. He used mathematics to then work out that the circumference of the Earth must be fifty times the distance between Aswan and Alexandria. If the Earth were a sphere, then by his reckoning, the equator must be 28,500 miles long. Modern equipment has measured it to be 24,500 miles. By the first century BC, the Earth being a globe was an uncontroversial truth. The flattening of the Earth at the poles was proposed by Sir Isaac Newton in Principia (published in 1687), and in the twentieth century space flight enabled astronauts to take photographs and to measure with accuracy elements of modern geodesy.

Despite the considerable evidence to the contrary, held true for centuries, there are still people who believe that the Earth is flat. The International Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society. Membership of the Flat Earth Society has increased over the last decade and it held its first ever international conference as recently as 2017. Many of its members might well have joined out of curiosity rather than a deep-held belief but, nonetheless, flat earth is big business, and the cunning use of social media, the disparaging of experts and the ease with which people question and challenge long-held facts has helped to ensure their views can be spread widely.

We live in an era of fake news. Plausible stories are created, a suitable image is found to accompany it, an enticing clickbait headline is given and then the story is put on the internet. It can be read and shared hundreds or thousands of times before any effort is made to correct it. Even if the post gets deleted and some form of apology issued, it is too late. The story is out and will forever be part of the folklore of that topic. There have always been conspiracy theorists willing to twist truths, but it has never been so easy to spread disinformation online. This provides a considerable challenge for teachers in schools.

There is a further challenge. Celebrities with a large public profile are often given airtime on TV or radio to speak about subjects on which they have no knowledge or experience. We listen to them because they have achieved success in other domains of public life. In recent years, we have had to endure footballer Gary Neville giving us his views on schooling and singer Charlotte Church explaining her vision for education. Celebrities using their profile to raise awareness for a charitable cause is one thing, but taking up valuable airtime to lecture on a topic they clearly know nothing about beyond the superficial is quite another. When expert educational leaders are invited on to programmes, they are not given time to speak about football or classical singing, yet somehow it is OK the other way round.

Why has this happened?

Conspiracy theories have always existed, but these ideas seem to have become more mainstream in the past few decades. The blame, according to Eli Pariser in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, lies with the internet and the use of social media. Not only does social media enable people with niche interests to connect, but it is also a key source of news for many people. In December 2009, Google introduced an algorithm which changed the way in which its search results were shown to consumers (Pariser, 2011b). Versions of this have been introduced across social media platforms since then. If a user clicks on a link, an algorithm buried in the site records the interaction and automatically offers more of the same content to users in future. This is done at the expense of other types of content. So, if a particular user clicks on a link to an article about the COVID-19 vaccine being used to inject data-harvesting technology, then the next time they use the same device to conduct a similar search, they will see similar content appearing. Repeated clicks on these types of articles will tell the algorithm that this is the sort of content the user wants, and it will keep offering them more. This algorithm was initially introduced without consumer knowledge, but even now it can lead to confirmation bias – the idea that a particular view can be reinforced time and time again through repeated clicks in the backwaters of the internet. The user wallows within their own online filter bubble, not always realising that their social media platform is filtering out content on their behalf. Those who view this content become more and more convinced that what they are reading is mainstream, so it is no wonder they believe that experts have got it wrong. The internet offers a blog written in someone’s bedroom which is riddled with factual errors alongside a peer reviewed piece of academic writing, and the consumer might be none the wiser about which has a greater claim to factual correctness. Nor might they care.

The COVID-19 lockdowns made the impact of online filter bubbles much...