Posted by Greeting on August 11, 2006 at 19:20:50
In Reply to: Re: Critical what? posted by Disgusted on August 11, 2006 at 17:32:13:
Thank you also for trying to be clear as to what the core of your post was.
There is one point that I must insist and it has to do with the course itself and I believe you are incorrect when saying that there is a course that is called something like "How to sexually abuse children". You don't explicitly say it but it is apparent all over your posts.
I would be surprised and angry by such a course. It would be a scandal of huge proportions for many reasons, may be even legally.
What you are actually talking about is the content that a professor is including as part of the course. While this may be an obscure distinction to you, it is important because the course is normally and legally part of a department's inventory while the content to be delivered and the manner in which it is delivered is normally part of the academic freedom that is purely the responsibility of the professor.
If that professor would be teaching close to where I am, I would get busy to make sure the whole world knows the perversation he/she is teaching.
Then, there is the little matter of bias in the information reported. All of the reports you present certainly respond to facts about pedophilia being part of some instructional content. That much I agree on but looking at the sources you use, only conservative sources who mostly use political language, I wonder. That is how much I can tell about your message and the pedophilia issue as reported by you.
Beyond that, while I agree that there are problems in the educational system, and the advancement of pedophilia would be one huge problem, I think that is not the only one. Another one is the interference in academic affairs of people who know nothing about it, including politicians or other groups with social agendas.
Just as one problem needs to be exposed and solved, so does the other and both are related to the same weakness of the system. What happens is that this very same weakness is its own strength. To think that universities should be trying to preserve the status quo is shortsighted. Universities should challenge the status quo. If that level freedom of thought produces some ill conceived, dangerous and even evil teachings, so be it. It is the price of freedom. If these teachings are pervasive and appear all over the place -- which is not true and the fundamental problem of the reports you posted -- then there is something major not only with the educational system but with the whole community that allows them. If that were the case, I would agree with you to start a witch hunt but since that is not the case, I refuted your assumptions.
About your observation of TF using academics, or pseudo researchers and experts, that is not new. They use the writings of these hired guns to support their own social construction. They might even fund some of the so-called research, which gets then exactly the type of voice they want.
What is wrong with the education system that allows this? Well, a lot. But one must be careful to look at the many things, more in line of thinking critically, which is almost completely absent from the whole educational systems in the United States, before throwing the whole water, baby and bathtub away.
For your own peace of mind, there is a force trying to modify many of the freedoms that academics have traditionally enjoyed and exercised. These changes are coming from conservative forces like the one you voice, but the intention is to prevent dissident voices to appear and question, mainly, government - both liberal and conservative. This is wrong.
I despise the interference of conservatives in the process of critical self-examination but I am also repelled by the liberal agenda of social reconstruction without said critical attitude. And these interfeering agendas come from the government, regardless of political affiliation, through the funding of their pet projects and the elimination of funding of those projects they want to terminate.
BTW, to say that I went babbling (which is your opinion) could be considered an ad hominen attack but then why bother?