"Thuglicans" and the Tea "Federation Party"

Leave the water alone, there's something we can put in our SCHOOLS to make people smarter and more skeptical. We should start logic and critical thinking in 5th grade, rather than waiting until high school (at the earliest) or college (more likely) before people are even exposed to this type of reasoning.Of course, then we'd have 5th graders questioning mommy and daddy when they make claims without reasoning, and we can't have THAT!

Every time is see an "sc" I tend to envision it sounding like an elonggated "s" sound or an "sh" sound, despite knowing that's not the case. When I invent words for my fiction, I almost never use the letter "c" at all. One problem we run into, is that when someone does exactly that, teaching kids how to think rather than what, you end up with a parent who complains about their kids asking too many questions...or asking questions that make the parent uncomfortable. (As an aside, that's why we have parents who wants schools to handle all sex-ed teaching, but also don't want kids to learn anything they don't agree with.) Exactly, it's the same for me. Now, when kids are really young, there are some things that need to be learned by rote, such as English, which has exceptions built right into the rules, or things that are too complicated to get into in 1st grade, but teachers should always encourage kids to ask about "why" something works, and my parents' favorite line of "because I said so" should never cut it. Between parents and teachers/curiculums that don't encourage (and in some cases even discourage) asking "why," the fallacy of arguments from authority get ingrained in many kids' heads as true, that they never even stop to think that somone on TV might be lying to them...unless of course it's the "other" side who get on TV just to lie because the "truth tellers" are making people "think." In their defense, fact-checking is quite difficult. When the largest source of information is the internet, which also facilitiates people posting anything that they want, you can find 50 sites backing up the latest screed on Fox. And only about 20 of them are owned by Murdoch.What it comes down to, is that when someone says something you agree with, you see no reason to fact check, because it conforms to what you already "knew" to be true. When that same person says something that you hadn't heard, but it fits in with what you "knew" you're more likely to believe that, and their authority climbs until it reaches a point that they're given the status of prophets or martyrs, depending on the specific case.The beauty of setting yourself up as a vanguard against "evil" is that you can keep people afraid to turn you off, lest you say something important while they're gone, and when what you're railing about doesn't happen, you can say it's because of the good, hard-working, honest viewrs who were able to stop it from happening...or somesuch nonsense.

I've been saying this for years, as well. Well, at age 2, it's pretty much in the hands of the parents, so we'll obviously have a range of knowledge/ability on that. It should definitely be removed form any public schools, but as for parental teachings, I'm loathe to tell parents what they can and can't tell their children, especially if they genuinely believe in a religion. I'd prefer letting kids learn about all religions and choose what makes sense to them (including no religion at all), but again, that's tough to force and I wouldn't feel comfortable doing so. You're welcome.

I hope you were saying this sarcastically...