There is a similar issue regarding c-19 tyranny. At the top there are many incentives to keep the narrative, which is understandable but still wrong. At the individual level there are mostly emotional blockages to realizing/admitting the truth. If one admits to being played then the world becomes a very different and dangerous place and requires a level of suspicion and vigilance. If one has been actively on the other side (forcing grandparents to be jabbed to access the grandchildren for example) then one is a hostage where freedom equals culpability and shame and therefore repentance and amends. This seems especially true for those who deem themselves of high moral character.
For the record we all need repentance and forgiveness. Romans 3:23
Dr. Gaty, you bring so much to the table—medical expertise, compassion, integrity, passion for Christ and his gospel, love of literature—every time I stop by to read your Stack I come away full of hope and inspiration. May you always be blessed in return.
I live in NM. We are at the very bottom of the list of states' schools. However, I believe we are at or near the top of the number of abortions and/or teen pregnancies per capita. The governor and the rest of those in the state's are quite proud of this. This column certainly explains why our schools are so bad here - what can you possibly teach the kids here that won't short-circuit their brains or afflict them with double-think? Especially if there isn't church attendance. You might as well be teaching classes in Swahili to the children of Singapore.
Excellent post. The Brave New World example has always stuck with me. It shows why we need “worldview thinking”, and not just isolated subjects. Shakespeare’s love sonnets are from another worldview that our Brave New World could never truly teach. Secular materialism, loveisloveism, etc, cannot communicate what Christendom can.
This is a beautiful essay with hard hitting truths. Except the myths about how racist and sexist our society is. The treatment of non-whites is at an all time high. Every commercial/advertisement must have a non-white or zero whites. We are living in a society that FAVORS women. Look at who the primary benefits of affirmative action are (I'll help you: White women). Look at who wins in family court/divorce court/alimony payments.
I'd argue abortion, transgenderism and rampant divorce paired with cohabitation and sex before marriage are our greatest ills.
The irony is that you are assuming racism to be against colored people or sexism to be against women, which is an example of a preconcieved social construct he is talking about. We still have plenty of racism and sexism around, it has simply changed its target.
The average person will read racism and sexism as against POC/women. That's the reference point. The author should've elaborated more instead of just saying we have "x and y."
As I prepare for another school year at a classical Christian school, this is a timely article. It reminds me of a memoir I recently read about a woman who went to North Korea to teach English at an elite high school run by an NGO. The Korean students had trouble understanding what it meant to come up with a thesis because the State told them what to think. Just teaching them how to write a three paragraph essay was subversive. Teaching them to think for themselves was so outside of their worldview, it flew under the radar of the on-site overseers who monitored what was being taught, mainly to prevent religious or Western ideology. Most of the students didn’t get it.
As a caveat, here’s the review I wrote about it: “Very interesting to read this account of an atheist teaching at a school for North Korean elite, living among the evangelical Christians who ran it. I learned a lot about a culture and system I never knew about. Kim is quite a good writer. As an evangelical myself, I found her perspective fascinating. However, her superior attitude towards her co-workers and her attempt to draw parallels between North Korean leader worship and the Christian faith and the surveillance of the State and her employers was sometimes very irritating.”
Oh, THANK YOU! What a marvelous book. Yes, her attitude is sometimes superior. She certainly has no love for our faith. But her insights into North Korea and the lives of her students are heartbreaking. Five years ago, we hosted two Chinese boys here on a summer program. I have stayed in touch with one, and I see so many parallels in their attitudes towards their leaders. While he is better off financially than the Koreans, the lack of freedom is nearly equally appalling.
I’m utterly baffled by education. Somehow, by the grace of God, I had an exemplary public school experience. Shoot, when I was in 4th grade we decided we wanted to go to the Monterey Aquarium. About a 6-8 hour bus ride away. With our teacher’s guidance (and a lot of behind the scenes parents)..we sold chocolate Statue of Liberty bars, chartered the bus-we we’re on the phone in the classroom with her next to us-, made reservations at the armory to stay, booked our tours, and she took us grocery shopping. We went for 3 days! I did so many neat things in public school…I can’t wrap my head around what happened!
Same. After the Supreme Court issued its 1962 ruling against prayer in schools, our elementary school principal, Mrs Doty, flouted this ruling serenely, and in her soul, gleefully, I'm sure. She led us in singing the Lord's Prayer at every school assembly.
What happened is that the Mrs Dotys died, and their successors were not made of the stuff which understands that it must defy evil. Enough decades of that, and here we are, in a generation which usually can't recognize evil, and even if it could, would think anyone's outspokenness against it "intolerant," "triggering," the usual crap.
God bless her! No religion allowed when I went through, but, dang I was taught stuff. Mrs. White, 7th grade honors language arts. Ironically, she was a large Black woman (I hope I didn’t get any conventions wrong there, lol?)
We were taught how to sit as girls and boys, how to stand at a podium and speak-as girls and boys, we did parent events all the time and the girls were in skirts and hose, the boys had on ties. The girls served refreshments and we were taught how and the boys learned how to usher a lady to her seat. Don’t get me wrong too much, I also learned how to shake hands, conduct myself in a job interview, and a whole host of other skills.
I have a 6 year old granddaughter and my husband and I are very involved in her life, caring for her and also paying for her to attend a private Christian school. She asks a lot of questions and so I think there will be opportunities for us to explain things to her as the years go by. But what do I actually know? Every day I seem to uncover some lie I believed my whole life. After telling her why she has Monday off from school, she asked what Labor Day is all about. While my husband started to explain, I jokingly threw up my arms and said, "No one really knows, honey."
Please, have more confidence in yourself than that! Your comment, troubling as it is, shows you to be intelligent, literate, and more than capable of teaching her.
Don't think yourself naive for having believed lies. We've all believed lies. Within your memory and mine, most Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the future of the world depended on our taking him and his regime out.
A lie which was believed by every doctor in the world throughout most of the twentieth century was that ulcers were psychosomatic. The smarmy, revolting watchword was, "It's not what you've been eating that's caused this, it's what's eating you!"
I think it was in the 80s that an Australian doctor who taught at an unglamorous medical school in Australia wondered if some pathogen in his gut might be the cause of his own ulcer. He cultured his stool, and found that it was infested with the bacteria, H.pylori. He prescribed a course of antibiotics for himself, and I suppose it ended all those psychological torments which were eating him up, because the ulcer went away.
He reinfected himself with H.pylori, and an assistant joined him in this experiment. Both promptly developed ulcers, and this time, it was two men whose psychological miseries went away with antibiotic treatment.
The two doctors were careful, and waited until they had more than a few examples of patients in the their outpatient clinic whose ulcers disappeared after antibiotic treatment before they presented their findings at a medical convention in Australia. Predictably, they were ridiculed. But other doctors who were intrigued by the hypothesis of the Australian doctors ran their own experiments on their ulcer patients.
Eventually, the two Australian doctors were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
We do live in a world of lies. A hot lie at the moment is the media Left's assertion that Oliver Anthony's song is a right wing cry of hate. It's the Horst Wessel song of our day, these shysters assert.
The Devil is Executive Director of the Cosmic Lies, Unlimited corporation, which has factories thrumming away nonstop. If you're a Christian, you must boycott any of the products of those factories. It's your duty. Christians are to take every thought captive, remember. We really are at war. Sanctification is about the renewing of our minds, and in Jesus Christ and His Word, you have everything you could ever need to make you the kind of person who is fit for battle.
You might start with simple explanations of things now. Children don't always continue to ask as many questions as they get older. If they do, do you know that they'll ask them of you?
I've a lot of cognitive dissonance about "what to teach" about our country and it's future. It is almost impossible to explain to my kids what I think is going on and where it might lead. If it's not nutty, it's certainly overwhelming. Even my spouse has a limited bandwidth for how bad things have gotten. But I have a gone down to long slow road of increasing skepticism* that the "pandemic machinations " accelerated.
Still, I am nostalgic for an uncomplicated view that says we can "course correct" to the things that did make our nation so attractive. I feel an increasingly patriotic sense to our Bill of Rights and Constitution. And I plan to vote in each election as through it matters. At the same time, I think we have destroyed ourselves from within -- by jettisoning wisdom and every moral & ethical constraint -- and are living in a sorta zombie democracy that may well a be heading toward a financial collapse that will make the secure and complacent upper-middle-class life that my children have enjoyed a past dream.
The most valuable thing we have imparted to them is that God promises to restore all things by his justice. Admittedly. they may well conceive of how this will look somewhat differently from their parents. But it has served as a bulwark for mental and spiritual health as they see that the world is full of problems.
* How to read yourself into complete skepticism about post WW2 America: John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman; Gary Webb, Dark Alliance (about crack cocaine and the Contras); Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties; David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard, Allen Dulles and the CIA; Whitney Webb Two Volume: One Nation Under Blackmail. In these books the baddies are mailnly right wing, nowadays they're left wing -- as "progressives" have gained more wealth and power by exploiting their offices.
In any event, trust me, you’ll never believe in “accidental plane crashes” and “suicides” again.
Stay close. Remember the infant Moses. Eventually, your opportunity to commit holy subversion is likely to come. You may be asked to babysit a four year old. Pray, pray, pray, about it and for it.
I had believed in Jesus before I was four. I don't know who told me about who He is, but am certain it was whoever taught the kiddies' Sunday School class while the service for the adults was going on in the small church we attended then. My mother said the only bad thing about the church's doing Sunday school that way was that I could be heard babbling throughout the hour.
There is a similar issue regarding c-19 tyranny. At the top there are many incentives to keep the narrative, which is understandable but still wrong. At the individual level there are mostly emotional blockages to realizing/admitting the truth. If one admits to being played then the world becomes a very different and dangerous place and requires a level of suspicion and vigilance. If one has been actively on the other side (forcing grandparents to be jabbed to access the grandchildren for example) then one is a hostage where freedom equals culpability and shame and therefore repentance and amends. This seems especially true for those who deem themselves of high moral character.
For the record we all need repentance and forgiveness. Romans 3:23
Dr. Gaty, you bring so much to the table—medical expertise, compassion, integrity, passion for Christ and his gospel, love of literature—every time I stop by to read your Stack I come away full of hope and inspiration. May you always be blessed in return.
Much appreciated!
I live in NM. We are at the very bottom of the list of states' schools. However, I believe we are at or near the top of the number of abortions and/or teen pregnancies per capita. The governor and the rest of those in the state's are quite proud of this. This column certainly explains why our schools are so bad here - what can you possibly teach the kids here that won't short-circuit their brains or afflict them with double-think? Especially if there isn't church attendance. You might as well be teaching classes in Swahili to the children of Singapore.
Excellent post. The Brave New World example has always stuck with me. It shows why we need “worldview thinking”, and not just isolated subjects. Shakespeare’s love sonnets are from another worldview that our Brave New World could never truly teach. Secular materialism, loveisloveism, etc, cannot communicate what Christendom can.
This is a beautiful essay with hard hitting truths. Except the myths about how racist and sexist our society is. The treatment of non-whites is at an all time high. Every commercial/advertisement must have a non-white or zero whites. We are living in a society that FAVORS women. Look at who the primary benefits of affirmative action are (I'll help you: White women). Look at who wins in family court/divorce court/alimony payments.
I'd argue abortion, transgenderism and rampant divorce paired with cohabitation and sex before marriage are our greatest ills.
The irony is that you are assuming racism to be against colored people or sexism to be against women, which is an example of a preconcieved social construct he is talking about. We still have plenty of racism and sexism around, it has simply changed its target.
The average person will read racism and sexism as against POC/women. That's the reference point. The author should've elaborated more instead of just saying we have "x and y."
I'd vote for you for President right now, but you seem as if you are such a lovely person, I would hate to have you caught up in that world.
Thanks! I have my hands full as a homemaker but I hope we soon have a good President.
As I prepare for another school year at a classical Christian school, this is a timely article. It reminds me of a memoir I recently read about a woman who went to North Korea to teach English at an elite high school run by an NGO. The Korean students had trouble understanding what it meant to come up with a thesis because the State told them what to think. Just teaching them how to write a three paragraph essay was subversive. Teaching them to think for themselves was so outside of their worldview, it flew under the radar of the on-site overseers who monitored what was being taught, mainly to prevent religious or Western ideology. Most of the students didn’t get it.
I would love to read that book. What is the title, please?
“Without You, There is No Us” by Suki Kim.
As a caveat, here’s the review I wrote about it: “Very interesting to read this account of an atheist teaching at a school for North Korean elite, living among the evangelical Christians who ran it. I learned a lot about a culture and system I never knew about. Kim is quite a good writer. As an evangelical myself, I found her perspective fascinating. However, her superior attitude towards her co-workers and her attempt to draw parallels between North Korean leader worship and the Christian faith and the surveillance of the State and her employers was sometimes very irritating.”
Oh, THANK YOU! What a marvelous book. Yes, her attitude is sometimes superior. She certainly has no love for our faith. But her insights into North Korea and the lives of her students are heartbreaking. Five years ago, we hosted two Chinese boys here on a summer program. I have stayed in touch with one, and I see so many parallels in their attitudes towards their leaders. While he is better off financially than the Koreans, the lack of freedom is nearly equally appalling.
Thank you. and thank you for the review. I'll see if I can find a copy.
I’m utterly baffled by education. Somehow, by the grace of God, I had an exemplary public school experience. Shoot, when I was in 4th grade we decided we wanted to go to the Monterey Aquarium. About a 6-8 hour bus ride away. With our teacher’s guidance (and a lot of behind the scenes parents)..we sold chocolate Statue of Liberty bars, chartered the bus-we we’re on the phone in the classroom with her next to us-, made reservations at the armory to stay, booked our tours, and she took us grocery shopping. We went for 3 days! I did so many neat things in public school…I can’t wrap my head around what happened!
Same. After the Supreme Court issued its 1962 ruling against prayer in schools, our elementary school principal, Mrs Doty, flouted this ruling serenely, and in her soul, gleefully, I'm sure. She led us in singing the Lord's Prayer at every school assembly.
What happened is that the Mrs Dotys died, and their successors were not made of the stuff which understands that it must defy evil. Enough decades of that, and here we are, in a generation which usually can't recognize evil, and even if it could, would think anyone's outspokenness against it "intolerant," "triggering," the usual crap.
God bless her! No religion allowed when I went through, but, dang I was taught stuff. Mrs. White, 7th grade honors language arts. Ironically, she was a large Black woman (I hope I didn’t get any conventions wrong there, lol?)
We were taught how to sit as girls and boys, how to stand at a podium and speak-as girls and boys, we did parent events all the time and the girls were in skirts and hose, the boys had on ties. The girls served refreshments and we were taught how and the boys learned how to usher a lady to her seat. Don’t get me wrong too much, I also learned how to shake hands, conduct myself in a job interview, and a whole host of other skills.
I'm Southern, and you can bet they insisted we be little gentlemen and ladies.
As for you, you capitalized the B in "black," so you get to fly out of Casablanca.
Phew? Maybe? Lol, conventions scare me these days! I also wouldn’t be too terribly sad to hang out with Rick and Sam!
We must erase history in order to repeat it. Sounds crazy but ain’t it kinda true?
Re: "Pretty good incentive to stick to trigonometry." But, teaching higher math is racist now! That is how far we have fallen.
I have a 6 year old granddaughter and my husband and I are very involved in her life, caring for her and also paying for her to attend a private Christian school. She asks a lot of questions and so I think there will be opportunities for us to explain things to her as the years go by. But what do I actually know? Every day I seem to uncover some lie I believed my whole life. After telling her why she has Monday off from school, she asked what Labor Day is all about. While my husband started to explain, I jokingly threw up my arms and said, "No one really knows, honey."
Please, have more confidence in yourself than that! Your comment, troubling as it is, shows you to be intelligent, literate, and more than capable of teaching her.
Don't think yourself naive for having believed lies. We've all believed lies. Within your memory and mine, most Americans were convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that the future of the world depended on our taking him and his regime out.
A lie which was believed by every doctor in the world throughout most of the twentieth century was that ulcers were psychosomatic. The smarmy, revolting watchword was, "It's not what you've been eating that's caused this, it's what's eating you!"
I think it was in the 80s that an Australian doctor who taught at an unglamorous medical school in Australia wondered if some pathogen in his gut might be the cause of his own ulcer. He cultured his stool, and found that it was infested with the bacteria, H.pylori. He prescribed a course of antibiotics for himself, and I suppose it ended all those psychological torments which were eating him up, because the ulcer went away.
He reinfected himself with H.pylori, and an assistant joined him in this experiment. Both promptly developed ulcers, and this time, it was two men whose psychological miseries went away with antibiotic treatment.
The two doctors were careful, and waited until they had more than a few examples of patients in the their outpatient clinic whose ulcers disappeared after antibiotic treatment before they presented their findings at a medical convention in Australia. Predictably, they were ridiculed. But other doctors who were intrigued by the hypothesis of the Australian doctors ran their own experiments on their ulcer patients.
Eventually, the two Australian doctors were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
We do live in a world of lies. A hot lie at the moment is the media Left's assertion that Oliver Anthony's song is a right wing cry of hate. It's the Horst Wessel song of our day, these shysters assert.
The Devil is Executive Director of the Cosmic Lies, Unlimited corporation, which has factories thrumming away nonstop. If you're a Christian, you must boycott any of the products of those factories. It's your duty. Christians are to take every thought captive, remember. We really are at war. Sanctification is about the renewing of our minds, and in Jesus Christ and His Word, you have everything you could ever need to make you the kind of person who is fit for battle.
You might start with simple explanations of things now. Children don't always continue to ask as many questions as they get older. If they do, do you know that they'll ask them of you?
Fantastic post. I’ll be sharing this.
Thank you!
Wow. Praying on this.
The truth, DrG, knocks the wind out of me!
I've a lot of cognitive dissonance about "what to teach" about our country and it's future. It is almost impossible to explain to my kids what I think is going on and where it might lead. If it's not nutty, it's certainly overwhelming. Even my spouse has a limited bandwidth for how bad things have gotten. But I have a gone down to long slow road of increasing skepticism* that the "pandemic machinations " accelerated.
Still, I am nostalgic for an uncomplicated view that says we can "course correct" to the things that did make our nation so attractive. I feel an increasingly patriotic sense to our Bill of Rights and Constitution. And I plan to vote in each election as through it matters. At the same time, I think we have destroyed ourselves from within -- by jettisoning wisdom and every moral & ethical constraint -- and are living in a sorta zombie democracy that may well a be heading toward a financial collapse that will make the secure and complacent upper-middle-class life that my children have enjoyed a past dream.
The most valuable thing we have imparted to them is that God promises to restore all things by his justice. Admittedly. they may well conceive of how this will look somewhat differently from their parents. But it has served as a bulwark for mental and spiritual health as they see that the world is full of problems.
* How to read yourself into complete skepticism about post WW2 America: John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hitman; Gary Webb, Dark Alliance (about crack cocaine and the Contras); Tom O'Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the Sixties; David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard, Allen Dulles and the CIA; Whitney Webb Two Volume: One Nation Under Blackmail. In these books the baddies are mailnly right wing, nowadays they're left wing -- as "progressives" have gained more wealth and power by exploiting their offices.
In any event, trust me, you’ll never believe in “accidental plane crashes” and “suicides” again.
U R not alone!!
Small comfort. God bless you and wake them (us all) before much more suffering.
Stay close. Remember the infant Moses. Eventually, your opportunity to commit holy subversion is likely to come. You may be asked to babysit a four year old. Pray, pray, pray, about it and for it.
I had believed in Jesus before I was four. I don't know who told me about who He is, but am certain it was whoever taught the kiddies' Sunday School class while the service for the adults was going on in the small church we attended then. My mother said the only bad thing about the church's doing Sunday school that way was that I could be heard babbling throughout the hour.
I'm so sorry you raised your children to behave in this manner. I know it must hurt you terribly to be gagged to be with family.