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Comment by JasonFruit | Hacker News Reader

It is in fact weird that there isn't more focus on logic and critical thinking in basic education. I wonder how much of that has to do with government control of education: that is, the people who run the schools are beholden to those who benefit most from a population that doesn't think too critically about what they're told.

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I keep hearing this, but it's also a simple and convenient logical fallacy ;). If something doesn't go well, just find a perpetrator who you can blame. I'd stick with Hanlon's razor as usual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor .

The society is a complex system, politics is complex (you have to calculate what all those pesky voters say they want, think they want and actually want) and there are a lot of issues. No one in their right mind can be serious about trying to manipulate future elections through carefully crafting education for that purpose. Dictators do that, for sure. They can stay around long enough to benefit, but they rarely participate in fair elections.

What you're arguing against is the straw-man form of my point, but I didn't express it with much detail, so you can't be blamed for that. I'm not saying that leaving out critical thinking from elementary education is an intentional act by specific people; I'm saying it results from the internal culture of government, which is power-hungry, self-preserving, and long-term, like your dictator. If it controls education, the culture of government will ensure people are being educated in what reinforces the government: what increases revenue, ensures that we have a strong economy, a powerful and unified defense, and a law-abiding and biddable population. Critical thinking has not historically benefited government, so encouragement of it has not become a prominent part of the culture of government.

There is an obvious bias in teaching a version of history that casts our own country in a good light but the impetus against science and logic comes not from a perverse desire of government to maintain control over the population but from a perverse desire for religion to maintain control over society.

Tell me more about how the public schools are biased toward religion.

It might not be systematically biased toward religion as such, but I know of few other developed countries where creationism is taken seriously and taught as an "alternative" in school [0].

Or where books are stricken from reading lists or curriculums for fear they make kids question authority [1] – where or Harry Potter's inclusion in school libraries is challenged for their focus on magic (often based on claims that the novels contain occult or Satanic subtexts) [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/10/cory-doctorow-...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071230201312/http://www.ala.or...

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