A plague of locusts: teachers across the country are eliminating critical thinking and skeptical questioning

it’s not a bug, it’s a feature

It’s funny: under the new regime, we’re told that there are no “right answers” in math, or spelling, or grammar, but when it comes to social issues, there is one, and that’s the one provided by the state.

A climate change assignment in a Utah middle school instructed sixth-graders to write an argumentative essay in favor of eating bugs to stop global warming, but did not permit students to disagree. The only acceptable answer was that humans should eat insects for their protein instead of cows, which are destroying the Ozone layer with methane gas. 

[[A video recording was taken by parent Amanda Wright's daughter in the classroom.]

"How come we can't state our opinion and write that we shouldn't be eating bugs?" she asked Cutler.

"Because we don't have any evidence to support it," Cutler said. 

"It's kind of weird that I gave you a topic where there is only one right answer. We don't want to eat bugs and it's gross. But should we be eating bugs? Yeah, because we're killing the world by raising cows and animals. So we need to, not get rid of cows, but like, try to balance our diet so that not so much of our land is being used to raise cows, cause it's killing the Ozone layer."

"What if you wanted to – " the student interrupted.

The teacher said, "You don't have any evidence to support it. There's only one right answer to this essay. And it's that Americans should be eating bugs. Everyone in the world is eating them, it's healthy for the environment and there's just, there's only one right answer."

And how did this teacher “know” that there was just one answer? She’d undergone her own indoctrination,, courtesy of her school district’s administration:

Cutler later explained in a meeting with the parent that the "indoctrination" that humans must eat bugs to protect the environment was provided in a district training. 

She explained that she did not know there were downsides to eating bugs – and apologized for not allowing students to write about an alternative perspective.

"I am not aware of the agenda part," she said. "I am sorry for that… it wasn't intending to harm anyone."