Posted by
Paul Wamack on Friday, January 09, 2009 3:04:11 PM
It's been some time lately since anyone jumped forward to defend our educational system. There has been a joke kicking around recently that the Army's "smart bombs" are (luckily) smarter than our high school graduates ... because our high school graduates can't find Afghanistan on a map. It seems everyone knows that our children are not getting top quality educations in the government schools, but there is no game plan for changing that. Someone will point out that the teachers union is a big player in this mess. So here we are again, the government and the union -- but there is no need for a bailout here since they have taken over the whole process and look at the quality product we are getting. And yes, clearly we can expect our auto industry to "flourish" as well with the increasing strangle hold of the government and the union.
But the trouble I am having goes beyond the school yard. More and more, I am finding people who believe that the movies are real life depictions of history. Take, for example, the new movie about Richard Nixon -- there isn't enough historic fact in that movie to mention. To my knowledge, historic fact was never the intention of that movie. I believe that movie was made out of an emotional reaction to the fact that history is exonerating Richard Nixon and the film-makers wanted to get their position out there in the public forum. Michael Moore's would-be "documentaries" are factually bankrupt, as is Al Gore's "An Inaccurate Truth." Yet I keep talking to people who have accepted these various series of events as if they were school classes on history or ecology. Perhaps it is happening because they have no core education to compare the incoming entertainment to, and therefore can't judge its content against the real world.
What we end up with is history and science being written by film-makers and entertainment people, instead of scholars and researchers. Our history is important for us to understand who we are, how we came to be the people we are today, and where our country should be going into the future. For example, if no one knows who General George Marshall was, because they were never taught anything about him in school, then what his so-called "Marshall Plan" did to affect the socio-economic history of Europe would also be easily forgotten. But let some twit make a movie in the name of entertainment and claim that Marshall was gay or an alcoholic or fell under any other sensationalized personal shortcoming, and that would be all that anyone would remember. And the powerful effect he had on the history of post-WW2 Europe would be swept aside for some shallow twittering that has no basis in truth.
At the end of this process, movie-goer would have no real history. After enough of this sort of replacement non-history, per this example, our movie-goers would not understand why Europe should not also hate the USA as the bad guys that their teachers told them we were. Instead of learning about the real history of the world, and our place in the big picture, all that is left is this fictionalized entertainment fluff that has no idea of what has brought us into the world we live in today.
We aren't teaching our children the truth in school. We aren't getting the truth in our so-called news media. We certainly shouldn't actually believe the events of a movie. With so much garbage going in, is it any wonder that we get garbage-out on any "man in the street" interview segment? How can a republic govern itself if the people are clueless?
In parting, my all-time favorite "man in the street" interview segment was when the "reporter" asked a citizen how to spell "W-B-A-L-dot-com" and the woman looked him dead in the eye and replied, "I don't know."