‘Brainwashing’

Hysteria surrounding the teaching of “social justice” in our schools is stupid

According to a recent Maclean’s Magazine, our children are now being brainwashed – sometimes before they’re even born. However, this time, it is neither Bob the Builder, nor Spongebob, nor Activision-Blizzard, nor some other corporate-religious kids’ cult. Apparently, some dangerously long-haired left-wing progressives have got “the idea to encourage kids to become critical analysts of contemporary issues,” starting from an increasingly young age, or about elementary school. Sounds maybe not bad, but some reactionaries have gone off reacting and they think it’s just horrifying and absolutely bad news. They fear that, “social justice… can manifest in wildly different ways.”

“Social justice” is what it’s about, says Maclean’s. Uh oh. Apparently if more kids are educated on these critical issues at a younger age, then more kids might grow up to practically give a fuck. This is potentially something that some won’t prefer.

Personally, if we’re all persons here, I don’t think it's about having kindergarteners argue each other to death over the morality of abortion. This is more about promoting conscious awareness of the world and a deeper understanding of contemporary humanity’s problems of all types, which are both relevant and occurring now and will be even more relevant and likewise prevalent in the future. If we take a bit of a step back, it’s easier to take in.

Those parents and politicians who are quick to decry the movements made toward promoting social justice in elementary education may wish to save their breath. It will be a time not long in the future when the current generation’s children shall have grown to adulthood and stand to face what are potentially even greater social problems than those that exist today – unsustainable world population, much?. If we try to share the knowledge that we – and others before us – have already obtained earlier in the next generation’s lives, then they might have a better chance to actually absorb that information and employ it critically in forming a better, practical, and more realistic understanding of themselves and the world.

Of course, since they’re young and sometimes impressionable, they might be simply brainwashed by the ideas. “Locked in” by the brand new rhetoric. Better to have them continuously perform the same-old regularized and mind-numbing tasks of simplified rote learning, some say, in order to better prepare them for a statistically predicted probable future in menial labour and button pressing. Parents are always concerned about politicizing the classroom too, for the fact that their children might come home and ask tough questions of them about why things are the way they are. “Have Jonny learn his plain old geometry and them-there additionses instead.”

Meanwhile kids are already – and still – growing up, today as you’re reading this, and they will have to deal with social issues that were never expected. We live in an increasingly anomic, globalized, consumer-driven society where we seem to find ourselves almost constantly being force-fed mushy spoonfuls of right-wing brainwashing and being simultaneously presented with neat Christmas parcels of consumerized ideology through not only the global media and corporate advertising but also through the mouths and pens of politicians and even through this pricey education system – if anything, “social justice brainwashing” should be helpful and practically beneficial.

Dustin Christianson
Contributor

Photo courtesy picroll.com