The issue is a critical thought problem, but I think it is exacerbated by the fact that critical thought is condemned in school now. In addition, the indoctrination starts young.

I teach my math students several ways to solve problems and I tell them I do not care which of the several ways they use, unless the point of the assignment is the method covered. They routinely come back to my tutoring classes telling me that while my methods get them the right answers, the math teachers condemn using the other methods because the teachers don’t understand why they work. Mathematics is, at its core, learning how to use logic, which is the basis of critical thinking. Today, so many math teachers that I have dealt with deny this, which hampers their students.

We also have the problem that kids who think outside the box in school are considered troubled students, and are put in detention, given bad grades, made fun of, and other negative reinforcement. The whole classroom setting works hard to deny children the ability to become critical thinkers. Why do kids go to Grok? It’s essentially what the majority of their education has taught them to become, just another polite, quite little cog who repeats the biases of the teacher back at them for a good grade and kudos.

Society also makes it harder for parents to teach critical thinking. This does not mean they shouldn’t, but it adds depth to the need of help. I don’t know what all you, Grace, or Grant/Samantha got involved in as kids, but when I was in the suburbs for a few years, I received a huge amount of condemnation because I did not have my kids in enough activities. In fact, my parents and in-laws still think my kids are not involved enough. The average family I was told to emulate had their kids in activities all the time. You had to have your kids in competitive sports (which took up all Saturday too), martial arts/self defense, dance/art/music, Sunday school, youth group, plays, and volunteering. Most people looked at me like I was crazy when I said that my kids’ bed time was at seven-thirty, when they didn’t even pick their kids up most days from their last activity until nine on the average day. They had a snack on the way from chess club to track and ate fast food for supper in the car between track and dance. Dance ended at nine on every night.

When do parents have time to teach their kids? If you decide not to be this parent, all the teachers talk about how you are ruining your kids’ lives and all the other parents don’t allow your kids to interact with theirs. Even in my small town, it is a tragedy if a kid is not in at least three sports and/or competitive dance by the time they are six. I am continually reminded that our dance studio allows travel teams at four and that soccer accepts kids at three.

I believe that stopping parents from interacting with their kids, stopping them from teaching them, is part of the plan. If we remove critical thinking, we can convince people that Islam is the ideal religion, communism is the necessary form of government, and Stone Age living is required to save us from ourselves. Heck, the vast majority of the Democratic Party Platform requires stopping critical thought at the door, and not only teachers and teachers unions, but universities, the people who teach teachers how to teach all espouse the same anti-critical thought effort.

Critical thinking is important, but most kids don’t get that until they are in middle school or older, in part because of how brains typically learn. Young kids, such as elementary schoolers, do best with memorization of facts. Their brains memorize easily, and the parts of the brain most used for critical thinking and abstract reasoning don’t even begin to develop in the average brain until around 10. Even classical curricula do not emphasize critical thinking until late elementary or early middle school, and by then, according to my Common Core Social Studies (Thank GOD that I no longer have to teach this class next year due to legal changes) textbooks, the kids should have learned about the religion of Peace and the unjust creation of the state of Israel, as well as how we have to give them the benefit of the doubt because they are different from the rest of us.

My first grader got the benefit of a little of this tripe, along with anthropogenic global warming, the beauty of solar and wind, and DDT…. IN FIRST GRADE!!!! I worked pretty hard to skip some of these sections in her textbooks not to mention those of her older sisters. My fourth grader’s’ brain may have started developing the capacity to analyze these things, but that ability is still nascent. She is now getting the approved indoctrination full force from her textbooks.

The issue is not simply that these people have not thought critically, it is that it is almost impossible to think critically about something that you have spent all your formative years learning. We spend these early years driving certain thoughts into the brain BECAUSE we want some things to not require critical thought. I don’t want my kids to have to think critically about the fact that 1+1=2. I don’t want my kids spending all their time having to decide if break rhymes with steak or beak. I don’t want critical analysis determining exactly how to use the “ough” phoneme. This is what those early years are for.

I hate to use the word indoctrination, because all education is to “inculcate doctrine” but when we have false doctrines, it is all the harder to combat them when they are taught at the ages that defy critical thought. If you have been told all your life that Muslims are good and peaceful and that only bad people think Muslims as a group can do terrible things, it is nearly impossible to overcome that without something to the level of this video. Just as those kids on the video are being taught horrible things, our kids are being taught to excuse horrible things.

Really, we live in a world where instead of teaching kids HOW to think, we spend so much time teaching them WHAT to think and condemning critical thought. We cannot be surprised that so many folks can’t think why to hold a particular position is unjustified by reality.