Comment review: 05-01-09

another good education coment from LL3.

54.
Leo Linbeck III:
So, I guess I have a different take on this issue.

I’m not at all worried about the 12-year-old tunaphobe. Any kid whose parents can
afford to take them to a restaurant where seared tuna is on the menu will, by
the end of their senior year in high school, be able to read, write, and
calculate well enough to enter college and get a degree. These kids will likely
enter the workforce, make good money, pay their taxes, and vote. Over time,
armed with enough literacy and numeracy, they will come to see that the
environmental movement is anti-human; after all, the ecos hardly mask their
hostility to homo sapiens sapiens.

Now if they choose to live in a liberal
bubble like the West Village or Haight-Asbury, they’ll still believe all this
gobbledygook. But, then, that’s the way they’d believe regardless of what they
learned in 3rd grade, because those bubbles generally operate on, and attract
people to, a collective identity narrative that is impervious to logic, reason,
and data. The good news is that these bubbles are small,
electorally-speaking.

No, the big danger to our republic is the mass of urban
children who either don’t graduate from high school (>50% nationally), or
graduate with such minimal skills that they are dependent upon their “betters”
in the political world. Without the ability to read, write, figure, and think
critically, they are easily manipulated by the latest purveyor of
snake-oil.

Since Plato (at least), it has been well-known that a republic
relies upon an educated populace. Circumstances and environments change, and it
is the ability for the citizen to assess these changes themselves, without the
“leadership” of the so-called elite, that allows them to make good decisions as
a collective, through the ballot box.

What we are seeing in the AGW movement
is an attempt to leverage widespread ignorance into political power through the
liberal application of arguments from authority. This style of argumentation is
most effective on those who are intimidated by smart people, and it is a lot
easier to intimidate the illiterate.

So, at the end of the day, I’m not as
concerned that kids are learning the wrong stuff (though this is still a
concern). I’m much more concerned that kids are being rendered incapable of
learning and thinking on their own, and it is this incapacity that leaves them
open to the demagoguery that characterizes the proponents of AGW.
And it is
this incapacity that puts our republic at risk.
L3
Apr 25, 2009 - 5:03
pm