Re: We have officially become the nation portrayed in Idiocracy
I think he should give the speech--it's not as though he's the first to do this kind of thing. Reagan did it too . . .
One quote in the article, though, did ring true for me.
When I saw this, "The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President's agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates," suddenly, out of the dingy past, I recalled a couple of weeks or so of being encouraged, in grammar school, to support and "vote for" a candidate in a mock election.
I grew up in a place that is highly tilted toward the right, and on a daily basis, whole classrooms full of my older schoolmates were paraded past (and into) my own classroom, seemingly all in support of the right's candidate, many of them bullying the rest of us to cough up a shout of support as well.
Well, I was undecided then, and I am undecided now.
I was ostracized then, and it was not a welcome experience.
I wanted to talk about why one might be for one candidate or the other, but instead was taunted with multiple firehoses of party-line jingoism.
I wanted to find out who the other candidates were, the ones who did not appear on the national ads, but were listed in the newspaper all the same. What were their plusses and minuses? This suggestion was treated as beyond contempt.
It was not the first time, nor the last. (See any of a number of "tastes great/less filling" or "pepsi/coke" campaigns since.)
Richard Mitchell says "children always learn something in school, but what they learn is seldom what we had in mind to teach them."
Now that the town-hall fingerpointing has led (perhaps inevitably) to outright finger-biting, I'm left to wonder just what these people learned in school. Better still, what was the intended lesson?
And by the way, who runs these mindless public schools to which the vast majority of us send our children? And why doesn't that entity do a better job of educating its citizenry? This is a question I think pertinent to the current so-called debate.
Herring405
H
Herring405
(view)
I think he should give the speech--it's not as though he's the first to do this kind of thing. Reagan did it too . . .
One quote in the article, though, did ring true for me.
When I saw this, "The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President's agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates," suddenly, out of the dingy past, I recalled a couple of weeks or so of being encouraged, in grammar school, to support and "vote for" a candidate in a mock election.
I grew up in a place that is highly tilted toward the right, and on a daily basis, whole classrooms full of my older schoolmates were paraded past (and into) my own classroom, seemingly all in support of the right's candidate, many of them bullying the rest of us to cough up a shout of support as well.
Well, I was undecided then, and I am undecided now.
I was ostracized then, and it was not a welcome experience.
I wanted to talk about why one might be for one candidate or the other, but instead was taunted with multiple firehoses of party-line jingoism.
I wanted to find out who the other candidates were, the ones who did not appear on the national ads, but were listed in the newspaper all the same. What were their plusses and minuses? This suggestion was treated as beyond contempt.
It was not the first time, nor the last. (See any of a number of "tastes great/less filling" or "pepsi/coke" campaigns since.)
Richard Mitchell says "children always learn something in school, but what they learn is seldom what we had in mind to teach them."
Now that the town-hall fingerpointing has led (perhaps inevitably) to outright finger-biting, I'm left to wonder just what these people learned in school. Better still, what was the intended lesson?
And by the way, who runs these mindless public schools to which the vast majority of us send our children? And why doesn't that entity do a better job of educating its citizenry? This is a question I think pertinent to the current so-called debate.
Herring405
