Teaching Digital Literacy to Children and Youth Is the Best Way to Prevent and Prepare for Societal Crises

A personal reflection from School of Gaming's EU expert group member and our Princi-Pal Mikko Perälä on why teaching digital literacy is Europe's best defense against disinformation, and how five million educators can become our most important force for peace and truth.
Digital Literacy is crucial for children and youth
Written by
Mikko Perälä

How can we protect our children in the age of disinformation?

Our children are growing up in a world that understandably causes great concern among parents. The BANI framework perhaps best captures the fragile, anxious, nonlinear, and often incomprehensible environment in which our children are maturing toward adulthood.

The way we currently produce, publish, and consume information and media does nothing to make the world more understandable or manageable. Many of our children are forced to face digital content far too early, without the mental maturity or practical skills needed to process it.

Behind many sources of information lurk cunning attempts at manipulation, even when the content and its creators appear completely trustworthy and convincing to a young person. In the digital world, there is a relentless battle to influence the thoughts and opinions of children and youth, often out of sight from their parents.

Who is speaking with your child’s voice at the dinner table?

There are many actors who benefit from spreading disinformation. Some aim to divide society and sow disorder to support their own populist and/or violent power ambitions (far-right extremists, Russia, criminal gangs). Others use digital manipulation as a means to gain personal influence, grow their follower base, or make money. Often without considering, or even being aware of, whose agenda they are advancing.

Lobbyists in various industries also contribute to the spread of disinformation. They may resort to manipulation to push favorable political decisions or economic outcomes for their backers, often using exaggeration, distortion, downplaying, or outright lies.

Without diving deeper into the many forms of manipulation, some typical disinformation themes include climate change denial, misogyny, pseudoscience, body image distortion, anti-science narratives, fake expertise, and grooming.

How do we fight this multi-headed hydra of disinformation? What tools do we have?

The problem is recognized, and action has been taken

Three years ago, the European Commission's Digital Education unit published its first set of guidelines for teachers and educators across EU member states on how to teach digital literacy and what concrete skills it entails. It is a comprehensive publication, offering general insights and dozens of practical methods and useful tips on how to recognize disinformation and equip children with necessary digital skills and digital resilience.

However, in just three years, the world has changed dramatically. Technological development, especially in AI, has taken huge leaps forward, unfortunately enabling even more powerful tools for the creation and dissemination of disinformation.

The update of this guideline is currently underway and will be released at the end of 2025, aimed at both teachers and educators as well as policy-makers responsible for children and youth education.

In May 2025, 25 experts from the European Digital Education Hub gathered in Brussels to develop the framework for the updated guideline. These education professionals from across Europe are working on the project voluntarily and without compensation, driven by their deep belief in the importance of the cause.

School of Gaming is proud and grateful to be part of this expert group, contributing from our own perspective to the work and its outcome. We've learned a great deal, not only about the topic, but also about how the EU works. While we remain strong EU supporters, the slow grind of its bureaucratic machinery raises some doubts.

We need to deploy every tool we have

The 25 of us bring diverse expertise and experience to the table. Together, we can certainly identify what matters most in the fight against disinformation and how digital literacy should be taught to children and youth.

What is worrying, though, is that the final product might end up being just another booklet, a static PDF distributed through EU and member state websites. Meanwhile, "the other side" is armed with the latest technologies for generating deepfakes, AI-powered manipulation, and coordinated troll farms and media networks.

Perhaps this is oversimplification, because of course we have more than just a guideline booklet. The EU has five million teachers and educators. While they are often overworked, underfunded, undervalued, and underpaid, they are also five million deeply influential figures who engage with every child in the EU on a daily basis.

The EU might not be as nimble as Russia's troll factories, but those factories don't have an army of five million educators. In the fight against disinformation, our teachers are on the front lines. They are more essential to maintaining societal peace than any army or police unit. If we choose to empower them, educators can be the heroes in this battle against a faceless enemy.

What happens if disinformation prevails?

In short: terrible things. Disinformation is not merely distorted information. It is a systemic attack on the very foundations of society. It leads to the erosion of democracy, mental health crises, hatred, and violence.

Democratic elections lose their meaning, disagreements are settled through violence instead of dialogue, and trust between people and democratic institutions disintegrates. This paves the way for the rise of far-right extremism and totalitarianism. Algorithms control public opinion, surveillance monitors ideological conformity, freedoms are restricted in the name of safety, human resilience collapses, and individuals retreat into echo chambers. Isolation, loneliness, and depression increase.

A grim picture, isn’t it? And yet parts of this nightmare scenario are already visible around us.

How do we empower teachers and educators to win this fight?

Having been part of the EU working group for some months now, we can say with confidence that we need far more large-scale actions if we are to tackle this monumental challenge.

We must harness the same technologies and methods that are being used by the other side. First, we need to fully understand the scale of the challenge. Digital literacy must become a core pillar of education, not an optional side note left to individual teachers. Yes, this is a question of resources, and we must invest in continuous professional development for educators. But such investment is still far cheaper than the cost of future crises if we do nothing.

Emerging technologies also make scaling up more affordable. AI can be used for good. We don’t need to meet in Brussels every three years to update a paper booklet. We can build an AI-powered system that automatically updates, translates, and tailors the content of the guidelines into lesson plans aligned with national curricula and each teacher’s needs.

At the same time, the rest of society must be awakened. We must enlist the help of the very idols youth already follow, those professional online influencers. They should act as anti-disinformation agents and recognize their own power.

Parents, of course, carry great responsibility and must be supported in digital parenting. Sometimes the flow of learning can go the other way: from children to adults. Youth-led digital ambassador programs can empower young people to educate their siblings, parents, and peers in schools, libraries, and extracurricular settings. Young people often learn best from one another. Making cooperation and communication between homes and schools more visible and tangible is crucial. Digital literacy nights, free media and tech courses, guided gaming clubs, and game-based pedagogy are just a few examples.

The general pedagogical principle should be that digital literacy education must be made motivating for children and youth, with content designed to genuinely engage them. Gamification and the use of game-based learning are highly effective tools for this. We must be able to explain the benefits of these skills in ways that make sense to young people and help them understand their value for their own future.

Let us finally imagine a society where every child has access to a skilled digital-age mentor, a trustworthy and knowledgeable guide who helps them make sense of truth and facts in a complex world. In Europe, we can build that society. But it will not be built with a single PDF. It will be built through a collective decision to make quality education the number one strategy for protecting social cohesion and peace.

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