Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Students offered $100 to cite an instance of conservatives shutting down a liberal speaker

Spoiler: they can't.



There are not very many comments to this video but the ones posted are dismaying. 

Come on, they're kids, they're just starting to think about such things. It's hard to think critically when you have so little to go on by way of experience.

Think back to when you were seventeen and recall your own thoughts about politics.

I'm transported to my first college class. Something I didn't want but was required. Political science. The professor was young. She was trying to get us to understand why politics is important to us, how it affects every aspect of our lives. She engaged the class in a discussion about environmentalism. We were told to generate reasons why people would get engaged.

A student answered, "To get people to be aware about the garbage they put in the environment."

The teacher interpreted,"Quit treating the environment like a sink."

Then she wrote on the blackboard "Quit treating the environment like a sink."

She provided the answer, the vocabulary, then she put her own answer on the board.

And I'm sitting there thinking, okay, so this is how it's going to be. She told us to generate the list of reasons for something we don't care about then she tells us what to think and how to think it. I'm too old for this crap. She must think we are children. I was thinking critically at that age. Thinking critically about my teachers. Starting with the very first one. And all the way through I kept thinking, "Why are you even teaching, to exercise your fascist streak, to indoctrinate, or simply unemployable elsewhere?" The first eight classes the first chapter is about Marx, even writing, Spanish, psychology, and algebra, and I'm going, wtf with you commies? This persisted to the second year, macro economics and philosophy (of course) where they went much deeper. While my critical thinking was applied to the things I was being taught that never did cover critical thinking. 

The next video isn't conservatives shouting down a liberal speaker, but it is sort of like that. At least it's satisfying. The liberal counter to Joe diGenova on Fox's insufferable fair and balanced format is interrupting childishly, as they do, and diGenova yells at him to shut up. Basically.  


1 comment:

edutcher said...

Funny the only one that wouldn't stand for that was O'Really.