Some may wonder what the heck that title means. Well, it means what it says but I will elaborate because that is what you do in an entry.
Most should know that a paradox is attempting to prove or say something is true and is not true at the same time. In Math Logic, you have managed to prove the argument is written poorly and it is false. 1 = -1 is the basic representation. In a court of law, trying to make such claims would make you a lawyer. Doing so while on the witness stand would get you charged with perjury. In daily life, we call people who knowingly make such claims liars, hypocrites and someone whose word should never be trusted. (Unfortunately, I’m related to 2 of them so I know this well.)
Does this happen in education though? It happens all the time, especially in the public schools. Remember those who dictate the curriculum are not always guided with the intent of teaching factual knowledge but often influencing children’s values. But to do so often forces them to change facts or insert assertions to pose as facts to accomplish their goal. Let us see some examples.
In the past few decades, it has been asserted that our Founding Fathers were atheists and deists. This has either been pushed as a concept or the facts are muted so much that the concept seems to carry weight. However, there are two large problems with this that I’ll point out. One is it is recorded in the Library of Congress that before the Founding Fathers started writing the Constitution, they opened the session with four hours of prayer. The second is found in the Declaration of Independence. The phrases “endowed by their Creator” and “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world” are the key ones. Note both are uppercase making them proper nouns. Also note both “Creator” and “Supreme Judge” is singular. There is only one set of religions that assert a monotheistic creator and judge – the Judeo-Christian faith. It rings hollow that atheists and deists would pray for four hours to a “Supreme Judge” and “Creator” of the Judeo-Christian faith.
That is what is commonly asserted in Social Studies along with the “wall of separation of church and state” taken out of context (also known as lying). If the Founding Fathers prayed to and cited the Creator, God, and Supreme Judge in one of our two most important government and historical documents, somehow it is hard to press the concept they meant for government to be silent on the topic.
Another example I will take straight out of my daughter’s History text book and a question on a test. As I detailed before in Inconsistent History Lessons in 1st Grade, the curriculum asserts the speculations of ‘experts’ of how nomads traveled to the Fertile Crescent and founded the first city in Jericho and later on founded cities in India and China. Of course, this is clarified by saying they have no documentation to support any of it and are basing their opinions on some archaeological finds. They also make it clear that without documentation our knowledge is incomplete.
Translation: They made up a story to explain how things came to be.
Problem: The entire curriculum is undone in a Unit 5 test question. It reads:
“What do we call stories that explain how things came to be?”
Answer: Myths
This is why provable facts are so essential. Or any ‘myth’ can be asserted as fact. The defense of “the children won’t know” is a horrid argument. (Yes, that is the defense I got of the curriculum.) That is saying ‘Yes, we are misleading and lying to your kids but they are too young to know we are manipulating them.’ If that was said in a court regarding a business doing the exact same thing, the plaintiff would be awarded a massive lawsuit.
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