#underline_untruth - lessons of critical thinking

CLIENT: Gazeta.pl Marta Radziak-Kucharska (Szefowa Działu Rozwoju Marki Gazeta.pl),  Jan Wąsiński (Specjalista ds. Projektów Kreatywnych) CREATIVE AGENCY: Associate Creative Directors: Kamil Kuć, Adrian Zwierzyński Business Director: Katarzyna Czarnecka Communication Director: Jagoda Prętnicka-Markiewicz Motion Designer: Marcin Mokierów-Czołowski Project Management: Magdalena Kotlarska Tech Development: Marcin Gregorczyk AR PRODUCTION: PanowieProgramiści Digital Consultant: Adrian Hołota Project Management: Iwona Popowczak, Karina Głódź AR Development: Michał Olejniczak, Vladyslav Prosolupov, Grzegorz Szymborski Quality Assurance: Anna Raichenbach

Background: From the 1st of September 2022, a new subject – History and the Present (HiT) started in secondary schools. HiT replaced basic knowledge of society and is learned by all students of high schools, technical schools, and trade schools. The subject covers issues in social knowledge and recent history from 1945 to 2015.  The Polish textbooks approved by The Ministry of Education and Science on the subject of History and Present by Professor Wojciech Roszkowski, prepared by the Biały Kruk Publishing House. The information contained in the publication not just oversimplifies complex phenomena, but also directly manipulates the facts. While formally constituting a pedagogical tool towards pupils’ matriculation, HiT seems conceived rather as a PiS (governing party) -sponsored political indoctrination scheme.  In the textbook we can find a passage referring to children conceived through in vitro fertilization as “products of a human breeding program” and questioning whether these children would ever be loved. As well as gender is put in line with fascism ideology. An equally fraught issue repeatedly drawing the author’s condemnation are women’s rights and gay rights movements from the past decades, for which he not only blames the West’s descent into sexual debauchery but also the influence of “Neo-Marxism”.  Elsewhere, the author portrays the Black Lives Matter movement as a vindictive racist movement against white people because, according to him, slavery was simply the acceptable social and legal norm in the 19th century.  Creative idea: In response to the introduction of a controversial and politicized textbook for the high school subject - “History and the Present” edited by Wojciech Roszkowski, we created the #underline_untruth.  As we found dozens of examples of a manipulative narrative containing distortions and even factual falsifications in the textbook, we decided to ask the experts if it is a historical fact or merely the author's opinion.  It is almost impossible to fight political institutions, so we decided to respond directly by giving teenagers the tool to find the controversies sparked by the textbook. We did it with Gazeta.pl, in cooperation with Mr. Programmers. We decided to create an alternative to the already published textbook. We offered students space for a multiplicity of narratives, escaping from simplifications and avoiding a single interpretation - in other words, lessons in critical thinking. Our aim was to fuel a spirit of rebellion and own thinking among part of Poland’s younger generation. We believe critical thinking is the ability to analyze information in a rational and orderly manner. It is attentiveness leading to an understanding of the relationship between facts and concepts, so you can decide what you want to believe. It's recognizing, analyzing, and then supplementing the presented topic with a range of additional information. The ambition of the originators of the #underline_untruth project is to use manipulation from the textbook content to encourage the audience to make their own deductions. We found AR as a space for a multiplicity of narratives, an escape from simplifications and from a single historical facts interpretation. What became a starting point for us.  According to the research, teens today are discovering the future in technology and artificial intelligence through collaborative, hands-on learning experiences. It is important because the main audience for the textbook is teenagers who were born not only after Poland's entry into the EU, but also after the first Law and Justice governments in 2005-2007.  So, we created a mobile AR filter locating manipulations in the book and explaining them at the same time. When a passage questioned by experts reviewing the publication is detected, an animation appears on the screen, informing that the content requires a correction or additional commentary. The comments are written by experts in the field of history and methodology, such as a historian of ideas.  Our ambition is to use manipulation from the textbook content to encourage critical thinking and to encourage the audience to make their deductions. RESULTS: This campaign broke the mold of how textbooks should be used (especially by the students) and received good reactions from Polish teaching experts. Many teachers (including Przemyslaw Staron, Teacher of the Year 2018) and young influencers shared information about the campaign on social media. We reached a score of more than 200 000 scanned pages of the textbook in 2022 and over 100 000 views of critical thinking lessons on the website. Our campaign generated organically 2,5 million contacts with the idea online. Overall, the obtained Advertising Value Equivalent amounted to almost 550 thousand euros, with no paid media budget.