We have not been Invaded by Cultists
We shoot ourselves in the foot, or higher, when we support an educational system that fails to prepare students for citizenship.
The argument was so clearly wrong. It was a poster child for the “correlation is not causation” fallacy. Large cities have Democratic mayors and large cities have a high homicide rate (the commentator said crime rate, but that is a different fallacy issue). Therefore the Democratic Party is responsible for crime.
No educated person in this society should miss this one. But many people do! The commentator in question and his network are popular.
What’s gone wrong? Some people are quick to blame others for being stupid or “cultists,” i.e. so partisan they can’t think logically.
Yes, some of our “blindness” can be explained by the true believer phenomena. Psychology does a pretty good job of explaining such biases.
But these explanations do not explain enough. I would suggest they don’t get at the root of the problem. It is a sociological problem, not a psychological problem. At the present time, our education system does not meet the needs of an increasingly complex technological society.
We are not giving our youth enough of the right kind of education. An educated person should know how to make critical use of social facts, even when this information is complex and ever changing. (Science and technology are ever adjusting our understanding of underlying conditions of social life.)
Ironically, critics of education are focusing on issues like “race theory” and seem to be going in the direction of making the system even less responsive to the real needs of the times. As a result many of us into becoming supporters of the education system as it is.
Such a defense of current educational practice is ironic, I’m saying, because the system is really in need of reform, but of a different kind. Citizenship requires skeptical, informed thinking. This can be taught. Such attitudes need to be woven through and throughout the 12 years of education that we depend on for our country’s future.
Again, like so many blogs, mine and others, this is finally about democracy. It “works” when the citizenry are properly educated. And only then.
I think there is a bit of a cult here. I also think that the smaller the group is, the more extreme its attention getters can become. I think that's why we see this escalated competition for clicks and likes to one-up each another.
One of the reasons I think it's a cult is that it's gone completely off the rails vis-a-vis reality. Let's take, for example, critical race theory in our elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. They don't teach Critical Race Theory. And yet, there they are, the cultists, issuing death threats, shutting down school board meetings, and screaming about CRT all across the country. Surely, I have to wonder, someone is benefitting from this insanity. One thought is there's an entire industry of private schools, religious schools, homeschool groups (also mostly religious), etc.
Of course, we can try to reform our educations system. What's the proposal? Do away with non-public schools that don't conform to science and lack of religion and instead conform to the beliefs of a fairly large segment of the population and a few billionaires? Good luck with that. I'm not sure all this fuss over the particulars of an education is really the problem. When I was in elementary school, For instance, I was taught that people in the time of Columbus thought the earth was flat and his voyages taught everyone otherwise. Now I know this wasn't true at all. I realize this isn't the same as learning writing skills, math, science, and stuff like that but facts as we know them can change and we just need to be able to change with our new facts. I also have come to the opinion that, above all other factors, the teacher that's with your kids is more important than a school itself.
One reason why I say it's a cult is the outlier nature of white evangelical support for the big lie and anything Trump. No other religious group even comes close. If this one group was taken out of our equations, all of this nonsense would be gone. Completely gone. And we'd be free to get to whatever it is we want to argue about, like policies.
Here's a poll:
https://www.prri.org/research/dramatic-partisan-differences-on-blame-for-january-6-riots/