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OPINION: In case you hadnt noticed, theres yet another election looming and the honeyed words of persuasion are beginning to flood forth from all points of the political compass.

Were set to be bombarded with pre-cooked talking points, what the focus groups and super-secret internal polls are saying we should be told, what the advisers are advising, and who knows, maybe a decent, fact-based opinion or two, truly held, if were lucky.

Shame this isnt Finland its population similar to New Zealands. Are you kidding? Too cold, too close to Russia and too many strange habits, like doing weird things to each other with birch twigs, they say. And they dont speak English.

But heres the thing, apparently Finland tops the annual European index that measures resistance to fake news across 35 countries on that continent.

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Warwick Smith/Stuff

Keeping a close eye on what is said during an election campaign can be a bedazzling experience among the volume of pre-cooked sound bites and occasional strongly held views.

Fake news, before Donald Trump was invented, used to be known as plain old propaganda, false or misleading information or just liesbut where Washington goes, the rest of us follow, so fake news it is now, for the moment.

We know that when Trump moans about fake news, what he is really objecting to is something he disagrees with. If only people do what he does and get the facts from Fox News then there wouldnt be a problem, right?

Fox News is an experience all right, but its relationship with the real world is way too obscure for this news junkie.

Besides, there are, thankfully, alternatives that house a smorgasbord of offerings when it comes to trying to figure out whats going on around the planet.

Meanwhile, Finland, where the government, it is said, became fed up with being targeted by fake news stories out of neighbours Russia, decided the world had moved in to something called the post-fact age.

What to do?

Teach a counter-narrative, starting in the primary schools, thats what.

Begin with why fairytales work so well and take it from there, right through the years so you end up with a generation of young adults who can critically think for themselves.

OK, here our school curriculum is crowded and about to become more so when all our schools start teaching New Zealand history, assuming they get the resources and teachers from somewhere. As another aside, how many of our schools dont already teach NZ history? A few, some, lots?

Anyway, back in Finland, the clever things have incorporated aspects of critical thinking into various subjects across the curriculum. So, its not in a silo, Critical Thinking 101, or some such, as you might see at university.

Thus in maths, for example, students learn how easy it is to lie with statistics see any politician of your choice for a working example.

In art, they learn how an image is manipulated. A picture used to be said to be worth 1000 words. Now its not so simple.

In history, among other things, they get to dissect propaganda campaigns, again a useful skill to have come election time. And in language, theres a lot of fun to be had looking at how words can be used to deceive people and how they might mislead.

It would be a good idea to wheel in George Orwell at this point, because he penned the primer on English language and politics in an essay, while his novel 1984 also contains some pretty useful pointers when it comes to seeing what can be done with words. Democratic Peoples republics are still around even now. You know, the sort of place where leaders get a 99 per cent yes vote in elections. And the misguided 1 per cent are sent off to the countryside for a spot of re-education.

All this feeds into journalism, of course, and how it is ideally practised in places such as New Zealand, where facts are sacred but comment is free is the basic credo.

To get at the facts you need verifiable information though. In journalism, there are providing sources who are traditionally rated as reliable, such as the police, for instance. But of course, we live in an age where were drowning in social media and everyones facts are as good as the next persons. And science is horribly devalued. Perhaps well hurtle back in time to when religion and magic were deemed to explain the world.

But places such as Palmerston North are a bastion of education, so it is here, and in centres like us, where the struggle is being fought out.

Some of the signs are encouraging, especially when you look at the dire state of other parts, except Finland, it seems, and see what is occurring.

Alister Browne is an experienced Stuff scribe and former Press Gallery reporter who will write a weekly politics column

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Beware politicians and their election-year tall tales - Stuff.co.nz