This is one of the reasons why I advocate that the federal government get out of the business of educating American children. Here too the government has greatly overstepped its bounds. What the government teaches through public schools and approved textbooks is often dubious at best, subversive at worst -- subversive not to the government but to individual liberty.
Public schools are also being used today to program children in irrational, unhealthy ways. It has also become politicized and some schools have been turned into little more than factories designed to manufacture legions of future robotic citizens who just blindly accept Big Brother's agendas.
By the way, one of the issues I have hinted at, but not elaborated, is the way that school can be subversive of parental authority. Suppose that there is a strong conflict between what one has learned at home, and what is promulgated at school. Then the student is merely confused, or the school loses respect, because it is teaching nonsense, or the parents come to seem like uneducated rubes who need not be listened to. Although conflict is not always avoidable, it is advisable that one try to moderate the tension. Liberal democracy, in order to succeed, depends on a truce about how we raise our children. Parental authority ought not be lightly challenged. That is one of the problems with the way the evolution issue is framed: there is no sensitivity shown for the fundamentalist parents who have to explain the contradiction of teachings to their children. Anyway, "education" which is ineffectual and furthers the disrespect for either schools or parents generally does more harm than good.........
FT |
