Oh my: As Moore is speaking people write things such as:
“Lord we pray in your name for Judge Moore and ask you to give him the strength and wisdom to endure the attacks of Satan in this election. We ask that every one of his accusers be exposed for the dark vile wickedness they are bestowing upon this great man and that your blessings be upon him, his family and all who support him. We ask in Jesus name and Amen.”
So this man comes home and teaches his kids “the truth,” the real truth and then he sends his kids to school where a teacher is trying to promote the growth of reasonable beings.
The potential for a good outcome is not high and one might imagine what a teacher-parent conference might be like and what the teacher might be asked to do to accommodate parents such as these.
It is difficult to teach to meaningful goal when critical thinking is seen to lead to disobedience and defiance because to think critically is to question rigorously until a sensible answer is produced. The process is unkind to nonsense. Working well it dispels that for which there is no evidence, for which no reasonable proof can be found.
Our schools have had to deal forever with the ugly dilemma religion, religion in particular, has caused and it is a dilemma only because the schools refuse to assert that they are about reason and now something else and, therefore cannot appease those who would are afraid of reason for what it would lead them to understand if they applied it to their faith.
Indeed, parents decide what is right for their children. But only to a point for doing harm to a child thinking that what you are doing to them is good for them still means that the child is harmed. Mistakes are one thing. Abuse whether intentional or not is abuse.
In order to avoid having to deal honestly with the dilemma, schools have dismissed, ignored, avoided dealing reasonably with it, have allowed those who cannot tolerate reason to have a voice in shaping what gets taught and how it gets taught and the voice of religion, as irrational a voice as it is most of the time, has made it so that reason, the teaching of solid reasoning, of critical though, is, at best a very minor part of the school agenda.
To avoid the confrontation, the controversy that erupts whenever religion, its basis in reality, its tenets based in that reality are even scraped, the institution is attacked and those attacks lead to compromises that are not at all benign. The consequences are horrendous, a school system that teaches students to believe what they are told, to answer questions as they have been taught to answer them. Questioning authority is punishable under school rules and most of the school authorities are comfortable in enforcing such rules be it through control of teachers who are not to think for themselves but do as they are told.
It is an authoritarian system designed to appease dogmatic and authoritarian people and their sheep.
