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  • Posted by Zenphamy 9 years ago
    The guy is a self described religionist (teaches philosophy of religion) and doesn't seem to want to except that there are facts and there are opinions. Standing in a Louisiana swamp long enough, it's a fact that an alligator will sneak up and bite your ass (fact) even if one has the belief that there are no alligators in the swamp (opinion).

    Even though he might not understand how to prove to himself that E=MC2, it's still a fact and is true. He could easily go back to school and learn enough physics and math that he could then go and test it for himself. He's as dangerous as common core.
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  • Posted by LetsShrug 9 years ago
    Regarding the teaching kids to treat each other humanely... sure they teach politeness, but they shirk at teaching when it's right to defend yourself, or to argue a point, which undermines the ability to know when it's totally appropriate to take a stand, or call someone out on their behavior, or say, "This is not okay!"
    Example:
    My 6 year old great niece, a kindergartner, just last week was sitting with her legs crossed on the floor in her classroom, she was wearing jeans and her underwear waist band was sitting higher than the waist band of her jeans... a boy sitting behind her grabbed the waist band of her underwear and yanked it upward and gave her a wedgy. My great niece, without hesitation, spun around, punched him in the nose and made him bleed. My niece (her mother) got a phone call from the teacher who said, "She punched him in the nose and that is bullying." My niece said, "that is not bullying, that's a reaction to defend herself. She did the right thing...anyone who touches my girl's underwear will get a punch in the nose...and if you want to take this further, the boy was sexually harassing her, maybe we should pursue that point..."
    How can a grown teacher even have the nerve to call that bullying? Too many teachers are just not smart...I wish parents would notice this. They lack the ability to reason and they're "teaching" our kids to do the same.
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  • Posted by LetsShrug 9 years ago
    Well never ever get this right in public schools. And Common Core is evil for this very reason.. it doesn't teach how to think or reason or use logic, it teaches conditioning.
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  • Posted by CircuitGuy 9 years ago
    "And they are, in a way, teaching moral standards when they ask students to treat one another humanely and to do their schoolwork with academic integrity. But at the same time, the curriculum sets our children up for doublethink. They are told that there are no moral facts in one breath even as the next tells them how they ought to behave."

    I think of those moral questions as axioms. Making them rest on proof results in circular reasoning. The only objective test for axioms is whether you can derive contradictory propositions from them. So I would consider some of these value claims to be axioms, not facts.

    The author appears to have the unstated premise that facts are more important, so when we say fundamental values cannot be proven, he says it's tantamount to telling kids values don't matter.
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