This guy thinks he can teach critical thinking.

Excellent, because he's right. My generation thought that critical thinking was denying everything your parents and any other authority figure ever thought.

"We want to learn how to think, not what to think," they said as they progressed through college, and gave themselves the right never to have to teach anything again. No alphabet, no addition or multiplication tables, no grammar, no historical dates or time line. All that went out the window on the excuse that "It doesn't matter if you don't know something, as long as you know how (where) to look it up."

This sounds lovely. Everything the hippies said sounded lovely. It's one of the stupidest lies I have ever heard. If you don't know that eight times seven is fifty-six (and these days, most kids don't, trust me), then how will you know whether eight marbles for seven cents is a better bargain than a dozen marbles for ten cents? You lose.

The upshot of having our kids this ignorant is that this generation of teachers, who were educated in the Eighties by failures from the Sixties, actually believe and teach to their students that "white invaders practiced germ warfare on the native Americans because they wanted to wipe them out." You have to be a hateful and extremely ignorant fool to believe this, but it's so ingrained in the culture by America-haters that no one questions it any more.

And as Dennis Prager asks, "If you believe this, how can you stay in such an evil country? How can you not pick up and move out of here as fast as you can? That's what I would do." He's right.

Anyway, the kids are incapable of questioning this germ-warfare hypothesis because they don't know anything. They don't know when germs were invented. They've never even seen an old movie set in the Renaissance in which doctors knew nothing about germs and were incapable of practicing "germ warfare". They've never been outside of their crappy little constricted horizons, which includes movies up to four years old, at which point they turn into "old movies" and are thus unwatchable. In fact, the only movies they've seen were about teenagers and pre-teens having their crappy little episodes of emotional diarrhea. It's The Suite Life and I, Carly or it's nothing.

There is so much wrong in so many ways here. This is one good place to start--turn ON the TV and watch TCM movies from the Thirties as the kids are growing up. Explain what century this story is in. Notice when you see something that's different from today and comment on it. "Look at that heavy clothing, I guess they didn't have fine looms to weave lightweight stuff."

Actually I'm betting you're in pretty much the same boat your kids are in, and you've probably barely ever thought about a loom in the entire course of your existence. Well, there's no time like NOW to start thinking about such things, because you're as sad as your kids are.

As for the germ-warfare story, I asked a politics board if they knew what was wrong with it. Everyone on that board was under forty years of age, and the average IQ was probably around 120 or even more. They didn't know how to look it up.

So screw the hippie crap. Get some stuff to carry around in your head. At the very least, you'll be less likely to get Alzheimer's.

Schools

I am watching a program in which the host has fifty studio guests, probably all of them teachers. I missed the first 10 minutes so I can't tell you, but they're commenting as if they are insiders.

This one refers to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as a problem because it means that every classroom is forced to slow down to the speed of the slowest child. One lazy kid who refuses to learn and the whole classroom of children who might otherwise have wished to learn are forced not to.

Sorry guys but this is nothing new. We had this in public schools in the Sixties. It was so important to them to keep every child in the same "social development bracket" (my term for whatever their miserable thinking was) and not to let any child suffer the consequences of his laziness.

NCLB may be a joke (it's not a horror unless you can blame Bush for it, regardless of the fact that Teddy Kennedy and his staff are the ones who wrote it) but it isn't a new joks. My thoughts on it? That at least the kids were getting tested once every few years, which was generally a step up from never getting tested at all, which had been the norm for the prior thirty decades.