Comment by atmavatar

Comment by atmavatar 2 days ago

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> It’s a societal problem in as much as it is a personal problem for folks unwilling and often unable to work with their kids on this stuff.

Even that is multi-dimensional. Another big problem we have in the US is that there are groups of people who don't want their children to learn certain things that most well-educated people take for granted.

For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution. It's also common to misrepresent the causes behind the civil war and gloss over the genocide of native populations.

Others could probably come up with additional examples.

lelanthran a day ago

> For example, it's pretty common to this day for some school districts around the country to skip over teaching evolution.

Is this actually common? The argument is quite common, but I expected that the actual number of schools who do this is a very very tiny number.

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rayiner a day ago

My daughter, at her very expensive deep-blue private school, learned that the Constitution was inspired by the Iroquois—who didn’t have written language—but didn’t learn about the English civil war where the ideas behind the constitution actually had their genesis.

In terms of being a citizen in America, it’s far more important to understand the English civil war, British history, etc. Those are the instruction manual for the actual society we have inherited. Even in my deep red state public school system, we spent way more time than was warranted on native Americans and other things that people feel guilty about. If you’re born in a multi-generational colony ship, you need to know how the CO2 scrubbers work. It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.

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  • mmooss a day ago

    > It doesn’t actually help you to know that some indigenous population was decimated by the mining of the uranium that power’s the ship’s reactors.

    It does, because for people to survive and thrive, they need politics and institutions that don't kill them and that produce CO2 scrubbers. The politics and institutions turn out to be much harder than the scrubbers - few societies produce the latter, and it's generally the ones with much stronger human rights.

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    • rayiner 21 hours ago

      But the world’s most technologically advanced civilization was built by politics and institutions that killed and displaced the native Americans then glorified that effort in movies and television. The guys who built the moon rocket and silicon valley grew up playing cowboys and indians.

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      • mmooss 17 hours ago

        Nothing is pure. You are ignoring quite a lot, and quite a lot that distinguishes that society and its peers different from than the others, far less accomplished.

        The question is not purity, but facing our own faults, personal and societal, do we give up and indulge them or do we keep our vision and confidence and keep improving?

        So many push so hard against liberty and justice.

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