Anyone else really fucking sick of the whole edgelord āwe donāt need school itās all bullshit when will I even need to know any of thisā crowd who will also immediately turn around and violently shame and attack anyone who says something misinformed or asks a question that they deem to be ācommon knowledgeā???
Like yeah, I remember highschool. It sucked, but not because of what I was learning. It sucked because teachers are overworked and underpaid/under supported, and the school system doesnāt give half a shit about disabled kids or kids with different neurological conditions or really any of the kids.
We do need schools. Whatever issues the system as a whole has, it needs to be reformed, not done away with. You cannot sit and gripe about how we donāt need any of these history classes because itās all stuff you donāt want to know anyway, and then go absolutely batshit insane when someone doesnāt know about Pearl Harbor.
Because those people arenāt stupid. They are being intentionally misled, neglected, misinformed, or all three. They are ignorant, not because they chose it but because someone else chose it to further their own desires.
Ignorance leads to harm. Ignorance leads to manipulation. Ignorance is why we have slews of people in the US who are so scared of autism (which IS NOT SOMETHING TO BE SCARED OF) that they refuse to vaccinate their children, which is a form of medical neglect. They are actively endangering people they care about because they have been lied to by political parties and religious leaders who benefit from uneducated mobs.
Ignorance is how you get cults. Ignorance is how people get taken advantage of. Ignorance is how you get genocide. ONE person decides they want power and they use the lack of education to amass followers who will support them blindly because they donāt know any better.
Everyone is appalled when ex-Mormons get on the internet and talk about all the things they had to learn as adults, who by all accounts should have known those things by the time they were fifteen. People lose their fucking minds when ex-Mormons mention they didnāt know how babies were made until after they got married at like thirty. I saw someone make an entire six minute video about how heās pretty sure all these deconstructers are lying for clout online, because how could they possibly not know?
They donāt know because they were intentionally kept in the dark. That is how high-control religions and cults operate. That is how you keep people under your thumb.
You ask how Christians could possibly think that evolution isnāt real? As someone who was raised that way, Iāll tell you.
From the moment my education started, I was fed misinformation. In kindergarten I learned about how God made dinosaurs, but they all died in the flood and the earth was too damaged afterward to support such big species even after they came off the ark. In middle school I watched Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos about how carbon-dating is all bogus and if any scientist tries to use it to debate you, you can say āAha! I knew you were wrong!ā and end the discussion there. In highschool I took apologetics, where we learned how to ādefend our faithā by constantly moving the goalposts when we spoke to atheists. We were taught that āWhat happened to the Missing Link?ā is a gotcha that no scientist would ever be able to dispute, and so obviously we were the ones in the right. I was told at every possible opportunity that Bill Nye is literally the antichrist, that he doesnāt have a clue what heās talking about, and that any Creationist (Christian āscientistsā) could debate him into the ground because heās so stupid.
I didnāt question any of it because that wasnāt an option. It was *literally* all I knew. I had such a fundamental misunderstanding of science as a whole that when I was exposed to true scientific facts and processes and studies for the first time, I could scoff and say āDonāt they know thatās not even a real thing? How ridiculous that theyād think I would believe it!ā
Iām doing the work now to re-educate myself. I have learned so much in just two years that I genuinely canāt speak to half of my family because it makes them so angry. And when I hear people talk about anything happening or existing ābillions of years agoā, my knee-jerk reaction is still āThe earth is nowhere near that old! Thatās how I know theyāre lying!ā I have to intentionally reprogram my thinking every. single. time. that I engage with scientific literature or media.
Itās hard. Itās frustrating. And it all couldāve been avoided if my own parents hadnāt also been misled their whole lives. Iām not going to make excuses for them as adults, because learning and doing better is your own responsibility once youāre not a kid. But I will say that if their parents hadnāt also been misinformed, they wouldnāt have learned the same lies that they later went on to teach me and my siblings. Itās a vicious cycle, one that is designed to keep people ignorant. It is purposely designed not to have an out.
So yeah, I donāt really know how to end this post but please for the love of god, have some empathy for people who donāt know ācommon knowledgeā facts about science or history. Most likely, itās not their fault. And the way they push back at you with nothing but misinformation and a dream has been programmed into them probably since birth. This is why we need education, why we need schools, and why it is so vitally important that we as a society do the work to reform our education system.
