Were With Stupid.

[elleng]

'It would be much easier to sleep at night if you could believe that we’re in such a mess of misinformation simply because Russian agents disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million people on Facebook.

The Russians also uploaded a thousand videos to YouTube and published more than 130,000 messages on Twitter about last year’s election. As recent congressional hearings showed, the arteries of our democracy were clogged with toxins from a hostile foreign power.

But the problem is not the Russians — it’s us. We’re getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign, aided domestically by right-wing media, was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won.

As we crossed the 300-day mark of Donald Trump’s presidency on Thursday, fact-checkers noted that he has made more than 1,600 false or misleading claims. Good God. At least five times a day, on average, this president says something that isn’t true.

We have a White House of lies because a huge percentage of the population can’t tell fact from fiction. But a huge percentage is also clueless about the basic laws of the land. In a democracy, we the people are supposed to understand our role in this power-sharing thing. . .

But Trump is a symptom; the breakdown in this democracy goes beyond the liar in chief. For that you have to blame all of us: we have allowed the educational system to become negligent in teaching the owner’s manual of citizenship. . .

One reason that public schools were established across the land was to produce an informed citizenry. And up until the 1960s, it was common for students to take three separate courses in civics and government before they got out of high school.

Now only a handful of states require proficiency in civics as a condition of high school graduation. Students are hungry, in this turbulent era, for discussion of politics and government. But the educators are failing them. Civics has fallen to the side, in part because of the standardized test mania.

A related concern is historical ignorance.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/opinion/were-with-stupid.html

[rusty quoin]

1. We certainly were ripe for the picking.

[elleng]

2. and getting riper every day.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

3. Sadly kicking and rec'ing. n/t

[MLAA]

4. right on, elleng. Very good post.

[world wide wally]

5. The root of the problem?

[BigmanPigman]

6. As a former CA teacher I can tell you that I have tried and tried!

I have written to the state asking for Civics to be a requirement in elementary schools since I believe good training starts young. I taught my first graders for over 15 years and they went to the voting/polling room on the school site each year as a "field trip" since I felt that they should see what is expected of them as adults in America. The people working at the polls always gave them an unexpected free "demonstration", even while citizens were actually voting. We would go back to the classroom and vote with anonymous ballots that were written behind individual privacy boards and the results were tallied by them in front of the class. We voted for everything throughout the year and they chose what would be on the ballot. The topics were ...what type of class party to have, which toppings should be on the pizzas, which field trips should our class apply for, if there was rainy day recess what games should we play, etc. My room was fair, respectful and democratic. I hope my former students take those experiences with them throughout their adult lives.

[LakeArenal]

7. I take exception to educators failing us.

Government, Administrations, school boards and parents are failing students.

[elleng]

8. True,

they're the ones largely responsible for the curricula (NOT parents, but they do 'vote.')

[LakeArenal]

9. I'm not saying parents develop cirricula

But it's much too easy for teachers to become targets when trying to discipline students or hold students responsible for their own learning. Teachers are threatened a lot by parents.

[Irish_Dem]

10. Was a walk in the park for Putin to commit the crime of the century.

And we set up the situation for him and won't stop it either.