We don't need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey teacher leave them kids alone
All in all it's just another brick in the wall
All in all you're just another brick in the wall
Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)
When we're born we have a clean slate, but we are not born stupid. The stupidity that is growing more and more common and accepted in our society today is the handiwork of our educational institutions - from our elementary schools to our high schools to our colleges. The educational system in this country has been assigned the responsibility of handing down to the next generation the knowledge, experience and culture of all the generations that came before. Instead it has veered left to become an indoctrination instrument that promotes whatever notions, fashions or ideologies happen to be in vogue among today's progressive elite.
In our high-tech world with its increasing artificial intelligence, we are seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by the people we trust to educate our children. Young people hear but one side of any issue without hearing the other side, and to compound the deficiency they do not receive guidance for developing the mental skills of further inquiry and critical thinking that would enable them to test one set of beliefs against another, let alone to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes after they leave the educational environment. Schools focus on teaching "what to think" at the expense of learning "how to think" and then are spoon fed a steady progressive diet of topics ranging from global warming to nuclear weapons to medical care to race, gender, and class identity.
Not only are students fed limited conclusions by their "community-organizing" teachers, but they are encouraged to galvanize and take action against these prepackaged conclusions, launching out on disjointed crusades, without either a knowledge of opposing arguments or the intellectual wherewithal or discipline to know how to analyze those arguments. The frightening result is that we see ten-year-old elementary school children carrying signs of protest in demonstrations, people signing petitions without any understanding of what they are petitioning, and a cult-like following of destructive self-serving leaders with counter-productive agendas.
Consider the woman asking people at a state fair to sign a petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears. Hundreds of people readily and enthusiastically signed a petition to ban a chemical we know otherwise as water. While disturbing at best this incident points up just how conditioned many people have become to quickly respond to anything resembling some politically correct crusade.
It was Will Rogers who said that ignorance was not as bad as "all the things we know that ain't so." The grim and dangerous reality we now face is that dumbed-down teachers are indoctrinating students to think that they know everything about a topic after hearing only one side of an issue, without further questioning or critical thinking. It takes a wise teacher to pass on an understanding that knowledge of one's own ignorance may be a more valuable thing than having the knowledge itself. This lesson seems lost in our modern world of stupidity by design.
In our high-tech world with its increasing artificial intelligence, we are seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by the people we trust to educate our children. Young people hear but one side of any issue without hearing the other side, and to compound the deficiency they do not receive guidance for developing the mental skills of further inquiry and critical thinking that would enable them to test one set of beliefs against another, let alone to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes after they leave the educational environment. Schools focus on teaching "what to think" at the expense of learning "how to think" and then are spoon fed a steady progressive diet of topics ranging from global warming to nuclear weapons to medical care to race, gender, and class identity.
Not only are students fed limited conclusions by their "community-organizing" teachers, but they are encouraged to galvanize and take action against these prepackaged conclusions, launching out on disjointed crusades, without either a knowledge of opposing arguments or the intellectual wherewithal or discipline to know how to analyze those arguments. The frightening result is that we see ten-year-old elementary school children carrying signs of protest in demonstrations, people signing petitions without any understanding of what they are petitioning, and a cult-like following of destructive self-serving leaders with counter-productive agendas.
Consider the woman asking people at a state fair to sign a petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears. Hundreds of people readily and enthusiastically signed a petition to ban a chemical we know otherwise as water. While disturbing at best this incident points up just how conditioned many people have become to quickly respond to anything resembling some politically correct crusade.
It was Will Rogers who said that ignorance was not as bad as "all the things we know that ain't so." The grim and dangerous reality we now face is that dumbed-down teachers are indoctrinating students to think that they know everything about a topic after hearing only one side of an issue, without further questioning or critical thinking. It takes a wise teacher to pass on an understanding that knowledge of one's own ignorance may be a more valuable thing than having the knowledge itself. This lesson seems lost in our modern world of stupidity by design.
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