Changing the Narrative

Years ago my daughter and I were discussing the Constitution and I asked her to quote the second amendment.  She picked up her history/social studies text book and read it to me from the back of the book.

“A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms in the militia will not be infringed”.

I freaked.  I knew that was wrong.  So I actually looked in her text book and it indeed had the second like that, but with “[in the militia]” in brackets added.

My daughter, a highschool student, thought that the words in brackets were part of the second amendment.  I had to pull up a real copy of the constitution on my laptop in order to prove to her that somebody had added those words.  That it wasn’t in the original.

The next day I started calling around and finally ended up talking to the superintendent of the school district.  He told me “The students know that brackets indicated words that were added.  We added the words to help clarify the meaning. ”  He went on to indicate that they had added words throughout the constitution.

When I reviewed the text book I found one other added word [of] and it did not change the meaning of the phrase.  But there were multiple words added to the2nd.  The children reading that textbook would have no way of knowing that they were not reading the correct translation.

Most students entering high school today can’t read the constitution.  They do not read cursive.  They have to trust that the version they have is a true copy, just using block or typeset characters. This will become a bigger issue over time. “He who controls the past controls the future.”

[Darcy] Geissler [of Fairfax County, Virginia] told the principal directly in an email, “When I was in law school, our first assignment on persuasive writing – a skill necessary to be a lawyer – was on whether or not a misspelling in a deed was sufficient to pass title. Not exactly a sexy or emotional issue. We were not handed Roe v. Wade, the 2nd Amendment, or climate change, even though we were law students with significant education and life experience.”

“The reason we were not given hot-button issues when first learning to write was because in order to learn persuasive writing, it is imperative that the skill not be clouded by the issue before the skill is learned,”

The problem is that everything in the education industry is geared to messaging.  In some cases this is good.  In k-5 what this means is that a lesson in math is used in reading is used in history and back again.  It is designed to teach basic skills and to help the student learn from those base lessons.

Unfortunately, today there is a different narrative being pushed.  Not to get children to think, to analyze critically the information they are given, but to instead think the way that the industry (and teacher) want the child to think.

In a YAF talk, Michael Knowles spoke about “groomers”.  The point he made was that if a 8 year old boy tells his teacher that he is really a girl and he is going to use the girls bathroom from now on, the teacher/school has to make a choice.  Regardless of the choice they are going to be teaching a narrative.  They can teach the woke narrative that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy, or they can teach the boy that “no you aren’t a girl, use the correct bathroom.”

For us, it isn’t a difficult choice, for many on the left, it isn’t a difficult choice.  The problem is that we have different answers and the education industry is filled with leftist.

The schools spend many learning hours per year teaching students how to respond if the fire alarm goes off.  Yet somehow they manage to do it without creating soul crushing fear in the students.

Today they spend as much or more time teaching children how to respond to “active shooter”. And they have managed to instill terror in students and parents alike.

At the local high school a student was recently removed by the police during the school day.  The boy had been playing airsoft with some friends.  One of those “friends” snapped a picture of him holding an AR-15 airsoft rifle.  That “friend” then added text to it something like “I can’t stand it, I’m going to bring my rifle to school and see just how many I can kill before they stop me.”

It was a prank.  Yet everybody knows about it and there was panic within the school system.  And kids were scared.  This is not the way to live.

The narrative thus is “guns are bad unless you are a Hollywood Actor shooting up people in the movies”.  Only the cops are good enough to carry guns.  Only the military should have arms.  6 rounds is ok but 7 is a killing machine.  A 10 round magazine is “safe” an eleven round magazine is only for killers.

The cops need 18 round magazines with two reloads but you can do it with just 5 rounds.

Nothing makes any real sense but the narrative goes on and on.  Always evoking fear to get people to give up just one more bit of freedom.

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