The answers of those Republican focus group are a tribute to the power of confirmation bias. They are also a tour of every shortcoming of our public education system. These people have no clue about how to think critically, how to take in and analyze complex information, how evaluate and distinguish between credible information sources a…
The answers of those Republican focus group are a tribute to the power of confirmation bias. They are also a tour of every shortcoming of our public education system. These people have no clue about how to think critically, how to take in and analyze complex information, how evaluate and distinguish between credible information sources and purveyors of bullshit who are deliberately manipulating them by playing on their emotions. They cannot grasp the complexity of our economy, and especially how long it takes for government policies that affect the macro economy (ex. inflation) to be visible at the grassroots level, or how factors external to government policy like the Covid pandemic can be shaped by good and bad policy decisions (Trump’s months of public Covid denial sabotaging the country’s chance to crush Covid early, and causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths because his inaction turbocharged the spread.) Attributing the good economy under Trump to Trump, instead of recognizing that Obama set up that success and Trump just coasted on taking credit for conditions created by his predecessor. It would take too long to describe the rest of the ways they are ignorant and missing higher thinking skills. I’ll stop there.
Elizabeth, I’m a high school teacher. Public education didn’t fail these people. They received the same education on civics, history and critical thinking that the rest of us did. They reject that education because they’ve joined the MAGA cult and it doesn’t fit the MAGA worldview. MAGA voters aren’t accidentally ignorant, they are intentionally, belligerently ignorant. Too many of us look at how ignorant they are and think, “it’s somebody’s - the schools, media, politicians’ - fault.” It’s not! MAGA voters choose ignorance, and do everything they can to support it. Don’t make public education a scape goat.
John, you're right and I apologize. I did not mean to make our _current_ public education system a scapegoat and I should have clarified. The millenials and Gen Z are showing in their politics that our education system recently is doing a much better job. I'm talking about mostly my generation, Baby Boomers. I went to high school in a suburb of Boston, but civics was not required, the history textbooks were still the kind that glorified what's good about our history and mostly whitewashed or omitted the parts of our past we should be ashamed about. There were only minimal references back then to massacres of Native Americans, to the way white settlers and the U.S. government pushed them off their land and effectively banished them to the least valuable and productive land available, and the government broke treaty after treaty with tribes. Minimal references to the full scope of the brutality of slavery and almost nothing about how the gains of Blacks during Reconstruction were systematically rolled back in Southern states to institute a new form of forced labor and subjugation called Jim Crow. And definitely nothing about slavery in the North. They did teach the injustice of the Salem witch trials and the evils of Senator McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activities, I'll give them that. And so forth. I think schools these days do a much better job teaching students everything they need to know to have a balanced view of our history, and critical thinking skills they can apply to current news and events, although Republicans in red states are now trying hard to return public education to the patriotism indoctrination of the 1950s and 1960s. I agree that you can only teach students what they are willing to learn and internalize. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, you can lead fools to culture but you can't make them think.
The answers of those Republican focus group are a tribute to the power of confirmation bias. They are also a tour of every shortcoming of our public education system. These people have no clue about how to think critically, how to take in and analyze complex information, how evaluate and distinguish between credible information sources and purveyors of bullshit who are deliberately manipulating them by playing on their emotions. They cannot grasp the complexity of our economy, and especially how long it takes for government policies that affect the macro economy (ex. inflation) to be visible at the grassroots level, or how factors external to government policy like the Covid pandemic can be shaped by good and bad policy decisions (Trump’s months of public Covid denial sabotaging the country’s chance to crush Covid early, and causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths because his inaction turbocharged the spread.) Attributing the good economy under Trump to Trump, instead of recognizing that Obama set up that success and Trump just coasted on taking credit for conditions created by his predecessor. It would take too long to describe the rest of the ways they are ignorant and missing higher thinking skills. I’ll stop there.
Elizabeth, I’m a high school teacher. Public education didn’t fail these people. They received the same education on civics, history and critical thinking that the rest of us did. They reject that education because they’ve joined the MAGA cult and it doesn’t fit the MAGA worldview. MAGA voters aren’t accidentally ignorant, they are intentionally, belligerently ignorant. Too many of us look at how ignorant they are and think, “it’s somebody’s - the schools, media, politicians’ - fault.” It’s not! MAGA voters choose ignorance, and do everything they can to support it. Don’t make public education a scape goat.
John, you're right and I apologize. I did not mean to make our _current_ public education system a scapegoat and I should have clarified. The millenials and Gen Z are showing in their politics that our education system recently is doing a much better job. I'm talking about mostly my generation, Baby Boomers. I went to high school in a suburb of Boston, but civics was not required, the history textbooks were still the kind that glorified what's good about our history and mostly whitewashed or omitted the parts of our past we should be ashamed about. There were only minimal references back then to massacres of Native Americans, to the way white settlers and the U.S. government pushed them off their land and effectively banished them to the least valuable and productive land available, and the government broke treaty after treaty with tribes. Minimal references to the full scope of the brutality of slavery and almost nothing about how the gains of Blacks during Reconstruction were systematically rolled back in Southern states to institute a new form of forced labor and subjugation called Jim Crow. And definitely nothing about slavery in the North. They did teach the injustice of the Salem witch trials and the evils of Senator McCarthy and the Committee on Un-American Activities, I'll give them that. And so forth. I think schools these days do a much better job teaching students everything they need to know to have a balanced view of our history, and critical thinking skills they can apply to current news and events, although Republicans in red states are now trying hard to return public education to the patriotism indoctrination of the 1950s and 1960s. I agree that you can only teach students what they are willing to learn and internalize. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, you can lead fools to culture but you can't make them think.