Today I want to discuss a man that most of you may have heard at from time to time. His name is Dr. Thomas Sowell. In my opinion he is an intellectual fraud and newspapers need to stop running his columns immediately. The reason goes to the column that he wrote yesterday titled Artificial Stupidity.
In this "column" he postulates about the supposed "indoctrination" that goes on inside our educational system. There is only one huge glaring problem with this. He has no training in the education a big thank you to Kimball Cross for pointing out my extra word (all of his schooling has been in economics) and if I had to bet the man has not been inside a high school, junior high, middle,or elementary school in at least 20 years and probably more.
The information he proposes is shoddy at best and an outright lie at worst. What is the crime of the educational system that has him so fired up that he calls the schooling "indoctrination"?
Many, if not most, of the leading conservatives of our times were on the left in their youth. These have included Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan and the whole neoconservative movement.
This fraud, who has less educational training than myself (I hold a BA in History Education) is pissed off because his personal heroes of the neoconservative movement were not taught enough to schoolchildren. My question to this is how does he even know this? I taught US History last year and there was an entire chapter dedicated to his beloved saints. The easy answer (and probably pretty close to the truth) is that he is making it up or just as likely he saw it on Fox News.
Early in his article he said:
responding like Pavlov's dog when we hear a certain sound
in referring to a bogus petition about banning water and yet his entire article was nothing more than Pavlovian parlour trick to get the many bobbleheads out there who know nothing of the education system to get angry about an issue that is non-existent.
My invitation to Dr. Sowell is to actually go to a high school for one day and follow a typical student's schedule and find out just how much indoctrination there is in the school system. Until that point he has no business whatsoever writing about something that he has not got the slightest idea of what he is talking about. If he had been honest about the article and presented up front that this was simply his opinion it would have been one thing, but he presented the article as if he had facts yet nowhere in that article did he once site any sources or studies to back up his provocation that our school system is an indoctrination system.
There are thousands of teachers that go to work everyday and do the best damn job that they can for minimal pay and no thanks. Unfortunately we have people like Dr. Sowell whose only mission seems to be to sully these teachers and give people false impressions about what actually goes into teaching. He owes every single teacher an apology and deeply felt thanks for the work that they do. Sadly that will not ever happen.
END NOTE: I just wanted to point out one other nice lie that Dr. Sowell (and many others, including the denizons at Faux News) pushes everyday:
But our "educators" have given assignments to children who are not yet a decade old to write letters to members of Congress, or to Presidents, spouting off on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to medical care.
The sad fact of the matter is that this has been going on for decades. It has happened in Democratic White Houses and it has happened in Republican White Houses, yet just now in President Obama's White House it has become an issue. It has not but the resentment and hatred that these people direct at Obama knows no bounds.