The key word in my post was "seek" and I was really only speaking to the fact that an individual's development has rather a lot to do with one's worldview, not just external influences . . . in my opinion and in my observation within my own family.
Planned Parenthood The Site Of Satanic Sacrifices
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The key word in my post was "seek" and I was really only speaking to the fact that an individual's development has rather a lot to do with one's worldview, not just external influences . . . in my opinion and in my observation within my own family.
Yeah, no kidding. Even moving doesn't really work when social media is there to keep everyone connected.
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For sure. I'm not disagreeing with you, the opposite really. I doubt if the nature / nurture debate will never be resolved, but I do think there are 'key moments' in a person's life between the ages of 0-15, which determine their world view in real terms, for a long, long time.
By 'real terms' I don't actually mean their stated political allegiance or worldview, but their actual relationship with the world (the two of course are often one, but not always) In reality, the 'same' environment is never actually the same for each individual - only in very broad terms. We all experience a very personal environmental experience, and of course, a very individual response to that individual experience.
I suppose the big question is how to align opposing view points into a workable common ground. Far, as some have pointed out in another thread recently, from easy.
Well, I've reduced my main FB identity time to practically nil....
But yeah, had to run from family...lol.
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Liberals often portray conservatives as being knee jerk or illogically attached to outdated ideas. However, one thing I've noticed about my more conservatively inclined friends is they tend to think of themselves as logical, practical, and pragmatic. They dismiss liberals as hopelessly naive or idealistic. "Do you really think people of different races and cultures can ever live in peace?" they'll ask.
Their go-to hypothesis for lingering social inequalities between groups of people is that the people involved may not, in fact, be entirely equal in a statistical sense. They don't deny, for instance, that some individual women are good at science or leadership, but they tend to feel that women are more illogical and passive than men overall, and therefore they reject the idea that society needs to do anything to fix gender inequality. They think affirmative action and so on is a hopelessly naive, idealistic concept, and they hate that it "picks the pockets" of the more deserving and makes it harder to just get on with things in the ways that have been shown to work best over time (or they wouldn't be the status quo).
This has always made me wonder how and why liberals are the group that get the bad rap for being smug.
I have to qualify this with the fact that my conservative friends with whom I discuss these things are more of the moderately and fiscally conservative bent. They're reasonably well off, college educated, and definitely not the sort to go to church, let alone follow televangelists. I've got some evangelical relatives. They've always struggled to make ends meet for various reasons, and they are kind of poster children for the sinking middle class in America. They're involved with that church in Colorado Springs where the minister had a sex scandal (with a man) some years back, and a pretty awful shooter incident that didn't seem to make national news. I'm not close enough to them to discuss their feelings on this, however. Nor do I know if there is (or was ever) a connection with Bakker's old PTL network.
They're officially non-denominational Christian, not Pentecostal, however. I'm not sure what that means in evangelical or fundamentalist terms. I'm thinking that being Pentecostal versus Southern Baptist versus non-denominational fundamentalists may be partially a regional thing? But Jim Bakker's network of ministries was nationwide and affiliated with some of our big mega churches out west back in its heyday.
Their go-to hypothesis for lingering social inequalities between groups of people is that the people involved may not, in fact, be entirely equal in a statistical sense. They don't deny, for instance, that some individual women are good at science or leadership, but they tend to feel that women are more illogical and passive than men overall, and therefore they reject the idea that society needs to do anything to fix gender inequality. They think affirmative action and so on is a hopelessly naive, idealistic concept, and they hate that it "picks the pockets" of the more deserving and makes it harder to just get on with things in the ways that have been shown to work best over time (or they wouldn't be the status quo).
This has always made me wonder how and why liberals are the group that get the bad rap for being smug.
I have to qualify this with the fact that my conservative friends with whom I discuss these things are more of the moderately and fiscally conservative bent. They're reasonably well off, college educated, and definitely not the sort to go to church, let alone follow televangelists. I've got some evangelical relatives. They've always struggled to make ends meet for various reasons, and they are kind of poster children for the sinking middle class in America. They're involved with that church in Colorado Springs where the minister had a sex scandal (with a man) some years back, and a pretty awful shooter incident that didn't seem to make national news. I'm not close enough to them to discuss their feelings on this, however. Nor do I know if there is (or was ever) a connection with Bakker's old PTL network.
They're officially non-denominational Christian, not Pentecostal, however. I'm not sure what that means in evangelical or fundamentalist terms. I'm thinking that being Pentecostal versus Southern Baptist versus non-denominational fundamentalists may be partially a regional thing? But Jim Bakker's network of ministries was nationwide and affiliated with some of our big mega churches out west back in its heyday.
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How would that have helped? Your Mr K would have done a whole lot better to engage the kid and the class in investigating the truth (or not) of some age-appropriate Urban Myth that wasn't entirely the province of whacko racists. Sending the kid to a Higher Authority to get The truth whammed into him doesn't help, if he has to go home to an Even Higher Authority which accepts and preaches the lies.
Supportive teaching of critical evaluation in the hope that a time will come when he can make use of it might have been a better choice. Esp because in his day, Mr K would not have been as hamstrung as teachers are today.
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I'm not sure shaming kids for their ideas is a better strategy than teaching them how to think things through, and I suspect kids (and adults) believed all kinds of crazy things back in the 60s and before also. I certainly remember billboards with conservative and fanatical messages in rural areas when I was a kid. Today, though, we have the internet and a plethora of highly specialized and targeted TV stations, so the folks who believe implausible things can support or reinforce one another and organize. And there have been some economic and social changes that made Americans in rural areas feel tossed aside. Racism and fanatical/intolerant approaches to religion are not healthy or productive coping strategies, but people don't always respond constructively to negative emotions. It's really common for all critters to redirect their anger onto inappropriate targets.
I'm really reluctant to lay it all at the feet of education, for all that I decry our current emphasis on teaching to tests and wish administrators would get out of the way sometimes and give teachers latitude to teach in the way that best suits their own personal style and that of their current group of students. But teaching students to use their noggins, do effective research, and to think things through without shaming those who have "odd" notions is the best approach, imo, not telling kids "how things are" as if the teacher themselves knows everything about everything. This leads to frustration and cynicism when the kids learn (as they definitely will some day) that some of the "facts" they learned in school were either incomplete, out of date, or just plain wrong.
I'm really reluctant to lay it all at the feet of education, for all that I decry our current emphasis on teaching to tests and wish administrators would get out of the way sometimes and give teachers latitude to teach in the way that best suits their own personal style and that of their current group of students. But teaching students to use their noggins, do effective research, and to think things through without shaming those who have "odd" notions is the best approach, imo, not telling kids "how things are" as if the teacher themselves knows everything about everything. This leads to frustration and cynicism when the kids learn (as they definitely will some day) that some of the "facts" they learned in school were either incomplete, out of date, or just plain wrong.