I saw someone complain on an online forum recently that their grandchild’s social studies teacher falsely claimed that Trump’s first would-be assassin was actually a Republican who shot at Trump because he was too old. Oh, and the second shooter wasn’t actually trying to shoot Trump while he was golfing.
Meanwhile, our kids are so dumbed down, analog wall clocks are being replaced by digital; kids can no longer read clock faces.
Our classrooms have become politicized, and anyone who complains is accused of forcing their religion on others, despite the widespread practice of forcing politics on others.
Schools claim they are helping kids with critical thinking though supposed learner-centered activities, but in reality, schools are churning out unthinking, indoctrinated young adults.
This leads to a lack of careful thought and evaluation of issues. It makes it easier for politicians to promote black-and-white, emotionalized appeals. For example, Kamala Harris is planning on doing a big speech about abortion rights, using the cases of two Georgia woman who died after botched pill abortions.
If you stop and think about this issue for moment, you can see that the abortion ban didn’t cause the deaths, what caused the death was the type of abortion used, in this case, commonly prescribed and supposedly safe abortion pills.
It is a known and deadly side effect that abortion pills might not fully expel the now killed-off fetal remains. Those remains can cause sepsis.
But the spin that pro-abortion activists are pushing is that the doctors in the first case didn’t treat the woman in time (it could have been that the hospital was just overwhelmed, and we’ve certainly heard cases of ER horror stories without abortions happening); in the second, the woman was supposedly afraid to see a doctor, but she was also on fentanyl.
These women did not use coat hangers. They used pills commonly handed out by Planned Parenthood clinics across the country. These pills have killed other women in states where they were perfectly legal.
This is not to say that everyone should automatically be anti-abortion, but because of politicization, we cannot see any sort of thoughtful analysis here. Kamala Harris will certainly appeal to emotion and continue the triggering of young women on the issue. Republicans will be labeled as trying to control women’s bodies, despite the Democrats pushing for vaccine mandates during the covid pandemic.
What we will not see is a national discussion about the safety of abortion pills or abortion itself. Nor will we see better training for young women to avoid unwanted pregnancy in the first place.
In all of this, proper education is lacking; oh, we have sex education in most schools these days, but it’s not about restraint but about how to use a butt plug.
Because so many K-12 educators are using their classrooms as pulpits to push their pet causes, whether it is Trump hate or gender fluidity, kids are not learning the basics, nor are they learning how to look at different sides of an issue. They are learning how to react to appeals to emotion rather than facts.
The answer to this is to not sit back and lay low while educators indoctrinate your kids or your neighbor’s kids. Pull kids out of public school, homeschool them, or get involved with the public school.
Meanwhile, we also have a big job to do in educating adults who have suffered brain atrophy from years of media dumbing down and partisan triggering.
Have you read any articles on sites like Yahoo! lately? The level of writing and analysis is like something a 13-year-old would come up with; actually, the 13-year-old could do better.
Having dipped my toe into the world of research papers recently, the higher academics aren’t that much better. They appear so on the surface due to the fancy words they stuff into their theses, but in the end much of it is redundant word salad, saying nothing in a lot of syllables.
Some of the people who see through the media brainwashing most fully are those without degrees; it’s often in the higher educational settings that the preparation is done to make the students vulnerable to media programming.
I’ve noted the change in definition of plagiarism to expand to basically having to document every possible idea in your paper and give credit to someone else…this isn’t about actually being a scholar but training kids not to think for themselves. I’ve seen the result - papers that have no original thought in them but are a string of references to what other so-called authorities wrote elsewhere, often based on their own second-hand sources that similarly reference authority.
This could be why some of the supposedly brightest minds we allegedly have are the dumbest - Neil DeGrasse Tyson comes to mind. The man knows how to explain stock ideas but can’t wrap his brain around anything slightly outside the mainstream of thought.
The end result is that we have a crisis in the intelligentsia…the people who would normally be sounding the alarm against tyranny aren’t helping. Instead, they are applauding it.
What can we do? Consider the following approach: When confronted with one of the brainwashed, try asking them questions instead of trying to pummel their head with another perspective. Their mind is too closed. Use questions to try to gently pry it open. I.e.:
When they mention that two women were killed in Georgia supposedly because of an abortion ban, ask:
Oh really, why?
Why were they in the hospital?
Why did the pills cause sepsis?
Aren’t the pills supposed to be safe?
We need to work to jumpstart those deadened braincells.
Try it and let us know what happens.
I do think you are absolutely on target with the suggestion of "attack" via gentle questioning.
"Have you read any articles on sites like Yahoo! lately? The level of writing and analysis is like something a 13-year-old would come up with; actually, the 13-year-old could do better."
I have certainly been noticing for quite a while that those involved in "journalism" show a decided lack of exposure to good writing. Why do I say this? Because they so often misspell, so often confuse homophones (rye in place of wry). And for goodness' sake, a spell checker is so easy to use!