The Invisible Villain
By Joe David - October 24, 2022
https://www.thedailybell.com/all-article...isible-villain/


Curbing the heavy drug demand among the young by closing the supply lane (open borders), ending the glamourization of highs (by Hollywood or the media), or heavily punishing dealers won’t magically end the drug problem.

To reduce it significantly, the root cause for the demand must be eliminated.

Responsible for the demand, innocently or knowingly, are a group of invisible villains. Because they are removed from the street activity without any traceable link to it, these villains known collectively as the American School Teacher can operate shamelessly with immunity free of guilt.

Motivated by faulty ideology, they approach their profession with a bag of tricks designed to dumb students down with worthless teaching lessons, pump helium into their empty heads with false praise, and titillate them with ideas intellectually irresponsible.

No longer scheming privately as once, they are today heard everywhere spreading with carefree mental abandonment their poisonous ideas. Gone are the days of honest teaching where students are taught the Three Rs and introduced to great thinkers by knowledgeable and skillful educators. Instead, a group of radically educated teachers are today boldly instructing the young on such unacceptable subjects as Genital Mutilation and Modification, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, LGBTQIA, Critical Race Theory, Transgenderism, and much more, ad nauseum. Parents who protest are treated like criminals or terrorists while their children crash in alleys from drug overdose or burn down the cities carrying banners supporting questionable causes mastered in school.

During my school days years ago, the teaching of subversive ideas leading young astray was more subtle. I remember a philosophy professor who promised to teach me profundities, but instead who undercut clear thinking with his sleazy philosophy of relativity; a literature professor who exposed me to numerous writers without identifying objectively for quality of thought or content; a psychology professor who systematically thwarted any mature observation of human behavior by loading me down with Freudian cliches; a sociology professor who graded me by some vague, subjective method conceived to conceal his biased grading system; and a journalism professor who insisted that I master footnotes (yes, footnotes) to significant historical moments without connecting the footnotes to some important concept or historical truth. As a result, being educated at best was being able to memorize names, dates, and events, disconnected from important and substantive ideas.

Such teaching over time results in intellectual mayhem in which students live by their instincts and gush an endless flow of information disconnected from any identifiable truth. To an intact listener, the students often sound and behave like babbling idiots who speak out on any subject with the voice of authority, but without the ability to defend their view because of their unstable premise. When parents rise up, and rightly, blaming teachers for encouraging such thinking, teachers invariably attack with a litany of false denunciations.

To collect evidence against such teachers is easy. All it takes is an examination of the volumes of nonsense students need to learn to be promoted – the irrationalities that are adroitly inserted into lessons to lead students to their intellectual graveyards; the “profound” ideas voiced by popular anarchists presented to students as noble thoughts of “freedom” fighters; and, by all means, the academic routine – the busy-work, the contradictory curricula content, and the revisionism in history, designed to confuse and even prevent students from grasping the big picture.

The result of such reinforced teaching over the years often causes a mental fog in which faulty ideas can’t be sorted easily for clarity of thought. To lift this fog, students in desperation resort to drugs. To protect students from such a fate, teachers must return to teaching the three Rs and sound thinking skills. (See my two articles, which I wrote in the 1990s for Basic Education [available at www.bfat.com]. Both articles exemplify how teachers ought to teach history and literature.)

Remember: A healthy mind that can think logically is a powerful and useful tool. When rigorously trained, it will reject faulty thinking and seek only lucid answers to pestering and deeply important concerns. Minds like that are the minds a civilized society needs among its leaders. Such strong minds, especially among its leaders, can change the world for the better.

Fortunately, fine educators do still exist, and some in the public schools. Unfortunately, as they expose themselves (even in our esteemed prep schools and Ivy League Colleges), many of them are being removed from teaching for not being “woke” enough. Such shameful practice must end, and those responsible for such misdeeds must be fired. For America to survive as a nation, educators must resuscitate their students before it’s too late.

Never, never forget that a mind that is trained to think deeply and clearly and that has collected enough sound knowledge to function smoothly is not a mind that will seek pleasure by using recreational drugs. Teachers who contribute to a student’s mental fog must be removed from teaching; the others, the decent and gifted educators, need to be suitably encouraged and rewarded.

_____

Joe David is a former teacher who has authored six books including two on education, The Fire Within (a powerful novel that examines the philosophic roots of today’s education) and Teacher of the Year (a whimsical satire that observes the lopsided thinking of certain teachers). For more information, visit www.bfat.com

Thanks for the article @ranchhand