School Vouchers Will Indoctrinate a Generation in Alternative Truths
My middle school students are good at telling the difference between facts and opinions.
Facts, they’ll tell you, are things that can be proven.
They don’t even have to be true. They just have to be provable – one way or the other.
For instance: “I’m six feet tall.” It’s not true, but you could conceivably measure me and determine my height.
Opinions, on the other hand, are statements that have no way of being proven. They are value judgements: That is good. This is bad. Mr. Singer is short. Mr. Singer is tall.
It doesn’t make them less important – in fact, their relative importance to facts is, itself, an opinion.
Our government has put forward statements that are demonstrably false: The Bowling Green Massacre. Undocumented immigrants commit massive amounts of crime. Donald Trump had the largest electoral college victory of modern times.
All of these should objectively be viewed as facts. They’re false, but they are provable. Yet when we resort to the kinds of things that should count as proof, we refuse to agree, we come to a clash of epistemologies.
Today, your truth depends more on your political affiliation than your commitment to objective reality.
There was no Bowling Green Massacre. No one was killed in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Certainly there was no large scale mass death perpetrated by terrorists. There were two Iraqi nationals arrested who had been planning an attack outside of School Vouchers Will Indoctrinate a Generation in Alternative Truths | gadflyonthewallblog:
