Talkin’ about a Revolution

YOU: Well, I mean, you are kind of less educated if you only learn from books that are.. um.. "consistent with scripture" so to speak.

[ here you state using scripture (or books consistent with it) are a poor base for a curriculum ]

ME: Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and similarly biased publications can be considered scripture [see also 1] in 'progressive' circles, especially those found around educational institutions. They have been used extensively for decades while educational outcomes have plummeted which proves the veracity of your claim but probably not in the way you intended.

[ here I state "indeed is a poor base, just look at the disastrous results achieved by using 'scripture'" ]

YOU: I'm confused? That seems to prove exactly what I was saying. That if you only allow kids to read the books that are "consistent with scripture" they are less educated. I'll take this opportunity to add that making any "scripture" the leading voices, leads to less educated kids. Your ideas will lead to the "dumbing down" of a society. I mean, maybe it will be a society sufficiently dumb enough to accept the doctrinal import of your preferred scriptures? But it'd still be a pretty dumb society.

[ here you repeat what I said in different words and directly after that claim that 'my ideas' (i.e. not using scripture as the base for a curriculum) will lead to 'dumbing down' of society ]

Where you probably go wrong is in the assumption that not using 'scripture' as the base for a curriculum means the doctrines of that scripture will not be discussed in any way. This is clearly mistaken since a non-doctrinal curriculum by necessity needs to explain those doctrines to explain where it differs from the doctrinal versions. Howard Zinn is a Marxist who does not like western society and culture and would like to see it succumb to some revolution or other - a doctrinal position. There is probably a similarly biased Conservative nationalist author somewhere who thinks western society and specifically the North American iteration of it is the pinnacle of human development but I can no think of a name since his books are clearly not part of the curriculum where Zinn's are. Both these authors, Zinn and the non-name Conservative nationalist produced heavily biased works which are not suitable as a base for a curriculum. That does not mean they should not be discussed, it just means they should not be leading the discussion. Reading the Communist Manifesto does not make you a Communist after all, reading Mein Kampf does not make you a National Socialist, reading the Quotations of Chairman Mao does not make you a Maoist. I say read them all and discuss their influence, show where they went wrong but also acknowledge that these works are the products of time and circumstance which created the conditions for their impact - the exploitation of industrial workers in the beginning of the industrial revolution, the single-sided blame for the first world war being put on the German Empire and the burden of the Versailles treaty weighing down the German populace, the succession of unpopular imperial dynasties and the power vacuum left after the 1911 revolution in China which the KMT/GMD failed to fill which create the stage for the next revolution.

Is there a name for the approach I favour? I think there is: the liberal arts curriculum [1]. Of course I'm referring to the original ideas behind this curriculum, not the 'modern' bastardised ideologically driven implementation of it. If it is called 'liberal' in the USA it is most likely not related to the original ideas behind either liberalism or the liberal arts curriculum - it is more likely to be the antithesis of it by being doctrinally rigid and closed to viewpoints outside the desired narrative.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberal-arts

Some people still speak this way in North America but it is fringe. It wasn't fringe when I was a kid. It was the expected way of thinking about sexuality.

In the early 80s at least there was only two "mainstream" ways to talk about homosexuality, as far as I can recall:

1. what happens in people's bedrooms is none of my business, just don't talk about it in public and expect tolerance, or

2. this is total deviance and a mental illness and needs to be cured. (Oh, and they deserve HIV for such unnatural behaviour.)

That changed, but only in the 90s/2000s, to an understanding that homosexuality itself is "natural" ("born this way"), and the so-called iron-clad laws of natural behaviour were "allowed" to include homosexuality. And even gay marriage.

Appeals to laws of nature and assumptions about what is natural mask ideology, and often look completely ridiculous 50 years later.

> Because that would be great. But unlikely.

I don't know where I'm at on this, but this is ad hominem. You can't discredit an argument based on who's making it. If you're opposed to humane prisons, just say so. But that's not what I'm getting.

"Objective" higher education and research designed to shape industry by genuine innovation is as rare as rocking-horse shit - mainly in niche areas of physics or biotech that don't have any commercial application yet.. but might one day.

Morocco in particular didn't have an explicit state policy of ethnically cleansing Jews, but "treated badly" is a bit of an understatement, considering the pogroms and the government policy of essentially holding Jews for ransom.