7 thoughts on “Deprogramming Students”

  1. My parents just, you know, actually talked to me about real life. Oddly enough, I always trusted them more than the illogical nonsense arguments of school. I always felt really annoyed at all the crap propaganda thrown at me.

    Instead of making my kids go through that, I’m just homeschooling them. :>

  2. I dunno. Sowell assumes twentysomethings are motivated largely by a lust for the truth, rather than, well, lust, which translates to popularity and peer-group approval. Not to mention the odd bit of Distinguishing Yourself From Your Square Old Parents that gets thrown into the mix.

    It’s a comforting thought that if you point out where someone is wrong, or at least hasty in judgment, he’ll slap his forehead D’oh and rethink things. But in my experience that doesn’t even happen except very rarely in people with half a century’s life experience in being wrong about things 86% of the time, which is about the record most of us rack up over time.

  3. I wonder if there are guides for the students then on how to deprogram your parents from believing that global warming is a leftist conspiracy.

    The Great Global Warming Swindle is a fraud of a film. I love it how the solar data is shown only up to the eighties in its graphs – because it starts going in the opposite direction from temperature after that so it is simply not shown.

    Gore’s stuff is not very good either, it’s stupid that there are so many errors and inambiguities and lame arguments.

    People should rather read about the issues. The IPCC reports (and their summaries) at least have had some checking and work behind them, and the arguments are backed by the working groups linking to peer reviewed well established research. It’s probably the closest an ordinary person can easily get to the vast body of science and evidence with few middle men.

    Global warming is no certainty. So far there are multiple lines of evidence pointing to it as very likely. For example, it is hard to create a physically correct and useful climate model that doesn’t produce global warming if you add CO2.

    Though I guess hearing the other side would be useful since one has to live in a world with lots of mixed signals. HIV denial and creationism come to mind as well as examples of anti-science viewpoints.

  4. The argument that multiple sides should be presented is the same argument creationists use. It is a red herring. As long as information is available people will get access to it.

    I don’t know if there is human induced global warming or not, but who cares? Jurassic period temperatures would be ok.

  5. Gee Godzillia! How do you proopse to re-create Pangea? Cause you ain’t going to get those conditions without that hulking landmass.

  6. The argument that multiple sides should be presented is the same argument creationists use.

    Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian.

  7. Rather the “both sides should be represented” is not a good argument alone, if there is a lot of evidence for the one side but little for the other.

    Ie should the “HIV does not cause AIDS” viewpoint also be presented and the students left to make up their minds on their own, since just presenting that AIDS is caused by HIV would be propaganda?

    There’s a dissenting phD for every theory out there.

    By that reasoning, all teaching is propaganda.

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