The February issue of Scientific American magazine posed a very interesting question relating to teaching American youth. How does a teacher talk about history and sociology when their parents live in an alternate reality than the truth?

            Image trying to teach about the Holocaust when the parents keep saying it didn’t happen or civics when “The Big Lie” is a constant topic at the dinner table. How does a teacher discuss American History and avoid the subject of slavery or the treatment of the Indians and the Chinese? When parents say other people are sub-human? How does a student learn about what Hitler and the Nazis did during World War II when their parents are Neo-Nazis?

            For decades less than twenty Texans have decided what is put in school text books. Now right wing governors attempting to outdo each other are restricting what can be taught and what must be torn out of textbooks to comply with their political philosophy. Just as Hitler’s Brown Shirts burned books he didn’t like, some places have had book burnings.

            I talked with a newly hired high school science teacher who was anti-climate change because he had graduated from a right wing university. He planned to continue spreading that misinformation.

            Teaching used to be simple as long as you told the truth as it happened. Now it is subject to the demands of misguided parents and politicians demanding their current thoughts are taught in lieu of the truth.