A Georgia school board voted along party lines Thursday to fire a teacher after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.
A Georgia school board voted along party lines Thursday to fire a teacher after officials said she improperly read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class.
I’m reading what you wrote and I disagree with a lot of it, but I feel like our disagreement runs deeper into something more fundamental. I’m just not sure what it is. To my logic, it’s obvious that this kind of centralized influence on childhood development is a bad idea because of how easily it can fall into the wrong hands. The classic “But what about when the bad guys win an election?” comes to mind. And I don’t know if that’s just not a concern, or is it not even a consideration for you? To me it’s all about the net-positive or net-negative. And to me, the system you propose has a net-negative impact on society.
I assume that there will be some measure of eternal back and forth as one side or the other fights to have their side expressed, but that given ready access to information there is an inevitable tendancy for progressive ideals to become adopted as the norm.
Consider the major advances over the past 200 years in society, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the generalized acceptance of LGBT rights, etc. Im the early 1900s it was the norm to say interracial couples where immoral, now to publically say so would have you in a virtual pillory. When I was young gay jokes where commonplace and to be gay was used as an insult, now I’m here arguing that free discussion of such as being good science and should be valid public education material. Short of extrordinary efforts at repression those kinds of advancements are not going to be reverted. The very fact that I even can have such a discussion with people across the globe at leisure helps ensure that.
There’s a solid reason why urban centers tend to have a more liberal bend to them in that the common exposure to alternate ideas, particularly at a young age, lends itself to acceptance of those ideas on their merits.
I don’t disagree that progressive ideas tend to be accepted as time goes on and that the “left” tends to be the main driving force behind them. However I also don’t think that the people that are on the left or right are inherently different. They believe different things and act on those beliefs, but underneath that there’s a common biological limitation of being human with a human brain. And I don’t think that we humans are as smart as we think. So, even the good side needs to have a limit on its power. Every government thinks they are the good guys. Because of that I fundamentally oppose creating systems where power is centralized in “the few”.
That’s the crux of it though. Public education and the standards of it are by default driven by a consensus on truth and rational. What’s perceived as truth can change over time as people learn amd society accepts new norms, but by the fact that these things are at least obstensibly deemed by the majority of credible bodies to be true, that by definition doesn’t make it power centralized in the few. The outliers that reject the standards are the few in this case and are welcome to voice their opinions through whatever reasonable means they wish, but are not permitted to deny the existance of or silence the generally accepted norm.