Bad weather

You remember Delaware's Christine O'Donnell, the woman who is no longer dabbling in witchcraft?  You may recall that she was in favor of local control over what is taught in schools.

What I will support in Washington, D.C. is the ability for the local school system to decide what is taught in their classrooms and what I was talking about on that show was a classroom that was not allowed to teach creationism as an equal theory as evolution. That is against their constitutional rights and that is an overreaching arm of the government.

Now, her reasoning was a little topsy-turvy, in that education is the process of finding out stuff from people who know more than you do.  If you're going to be telling them that you already know what's true, and that you only want them to teach you stuff you agree with, what's the point of going through the process at all?

You may also recall this gem from Rick Santorum:

Oh, I understand why [Obama] wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.

We now, I think, are getting to the bottom of this distrust of "liberal college professors."  They undermine parental authority.  Now, in my view, Santorum's wish to preserve authority in his own home, even in cases where he might be mistaken, leads to an authoritarian society, if carried to its logical conclusion.  That society would, for example, punish a scientist who discovers something that doesn't conform to the views of the authorities.  After all, we have seen that happen many times in history.

But Christine O'Donnell and Rick Santorum are only two people, and although their opinions are aired in the media, their political success is spotty.

But check out the new platform of the Texas Republican Party:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Here we have a major state political party saying that authority is a higher value than being able to think for oneself.  Now, I realize that they believe that courses in critical thinking are Liberal indoctrination, but the results of these policies, if implemented, would result, I think, in a dangerously authoritarian society, in which freedom of thought is restricted, and truth is determined by whoever is in power, rather than by logic and empiricism.

I've often wondered in this blog, why this craziness has taken hold.  I wonder now how far it might go. Sometimes it seems to me that obviously dangerous political juggernauts proceed in much the same way as natural disasters.  The mood comes over the populace, and there's seemingly nothing that can be done to stop it.  One hopes merely to survive it, knowing that, one day, it too will pass.

I hope this particular storm is a short one.