(June 20, 2015 at 10:47 pm)Pyrrho Wrote:(June 20, 2015 at 9:34 pm)francismjenkins Wrote: I dunno ... the shooter in Charleston had references (in his scrabble brained manifesto) that sound a lot like scientific racism (which has been long refuted). So yeah, if we were doing a better job educating our kids, you have to think it would be helpful with social issues like racism. That said, I'm not going to take the leap and say that it would have prevented this shooting (that would be wild speculation).
It is certainly difficult to definitively show that a specific act is caused by poor education. The author of the article, however, does not make that mistake. He says that this sort of thing is going to continue as long as the underlying problem is not properly addressed. As long as people are not good at critical thinking, they are going to think all sorts of bad things, and those will lead to bad actions. Of course, we will have great difficulty in proving that a specific bad action is caused by poor education of critical thinking skills.
In short, I do not disagree with what you state in that post, nor is there anything in the article to which I linked in disagreement with what you state in that post.
Education IMO would mitigate many of these cases ... but not all (after all, the kooky batman shooter in Aurora was a neuroscience doctoral student).
