When he’s not convincing us that The Total Gym REALLY CAN slide under our beds, Chuck Norris takes it upon himself to alert us that Thomas Jefferson would be very displeased with the way we educate our kids. After quoting Jefferson’s thoughts from 1820 that the University of Virginia should “be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind…for here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it,” Norris continued on and listed all the ways that teachers today are not living in accordance with those LITERALLY nineteenth century values.
In the first part of a two part article Norris wrote for World Net Daily, Norris wrote that 200 years after Jefferson pretended he didn’t own slaves and commented about education, public schools and universities began to “avoid testing truths,” “suppress alternate opinions because they are unpopular or politically incorrect” and maintained that “sociopolitical agendas or scientific paradigms dominate academic views to the exclusion of a minority even being mentioned.” Then, Norris cited an article written by Dr. Jim Nelson Black, who wrote what Norris described as an “excellent” book called Freefall of the American University. In it, Black says higher education facilities have become heavily biased. They’re also lopsided, and intend to train students “to disdain America, freely experiment sexually, forcefully defend issues like abortion and homosexuality, as well as become cultural advocates for political correctness, relativism, globalization, green agendas, and tolerance for all.” IN OTHER WORDS, Norris supports this man who believes that college students should not be educated on how it’s better to ride bikes around campus, that their gay roommates might become their best friends, or even realize that sometimes, America has been a fuck-up.
OBVIOUSLY THIS IS A LOT OF STUFF. However, perhaps what’s most interesting is that Norris does not believe time has brought society any advantages of any kind. In fact, he believes the opposite. He believes education, and perhaps society, peaked in 1820 or so, and has since then been on the decline. To him, we’ve become immoral beings because we’re conscious of the environment and we’ve started learning to do the atrocious thing of accept those who are attracted to people of their same sex. It’s sad that he fails to realize how empowered a child or young adult can feel once they’ve received an education, and it’s even sadder that he feels schools are working too hard to teach the meaning of acceptance and awareness of the environment. What’s also interesting is that Norris doesn’t seem to acknowledge that public schools (and schools in general) rely quite heavily on a Thomas Jefferson principle that Norris has said he approves of, and that’s the one about keeping an open mind. In fact, schools are designed to do that — they’re designed to develop kids’ evaluative skills by presenting options and different theories so they can form their own opinions. And all of the problems he says public schools have are ways that schools encourage their students to explore what might be considered foreign to them. For whatever reason, Norris thinks schools have all of a sudden become instruments of suppression.
Source: Dlisted
