Atlantic triangular trade and the dumbing down of our children.

Sometimes it is difficult to understand why people purposely shoot themselves in the foot. Obviously, they just might be as stupid as we naturally think they are but I rarely believe that; humans are simply too devious, too prone to deception, to make me think that there is not some ulterior motive for wanting to look as crassly idiotic as possible.

Take Texas' attempt to have the African slave trade re-branded as the 'Atlantic triangular trade' in school textbooks. On the face of it, it seems ludicrous to suggest it. I mean, what else do you call taking people from one place, incarcerating them against their will, selling them for profit and denying them all rights to which residents of a place might believe appropriate. What do you call being treated as one more possession in a bag of goodies that includes your washing machine, your cows, your house, if not slavery? And if you agree with that, what's wrong about referring to commerce, trafficking, in human beings for profit as the 'slave trade'. Why would you want to call it something else just for the sake of it?

After all, the people who engaged in it had different values (thankfully not values to which people now, generally subscribe). As far as they were concerned, they were doing nothing wrong. We might have a more enlightened attitude towards the dignity of man, all men and women, than they had but this doesn't seem to be much of reason to change the terminology, does it?

And while we're on the subject whatever happened to genocide as the perfectly good word to describe the attempted annihilation of a group of people on 'racial' grounds? When did this start to get supplanted by 'ethnic cleansing'?

Obfuscation. Not now, not in the near future. But eventually, if you hold onto power long enough. If Hitler had won, how long would it have taken for 'die Endloesung dem Judenproblem' to have become just that. A solution to a 'problem'. No longer the systematic, bestial destruction of European Jewry. How long before Texas schoolchildren forget the horrors of the slave trade because of the words used to describe it? Surely not in our lifetimes? Perhaps not. But that's not its purpose. Its true purpose is to to deflect attention away from the wider issues of what it's wise to teach the children.

For a nation built on the foundations of a desire for religious tolerance, a nation built on the principles of no taxation without representation, a nation built on the principles of government of the people, by the people, for the people, it seems a strange route to take. This desire to teach half truths to the children; give them little or no opportunity to draw their conclusions, make their own judgements. To talk of redressing the balance; that education needs to address the 'over-liberalisation' of school curricula misses the point entirely.

Children do not grow up to be responsible, rounded human beings, capable of independent thought, whether for good or evil, by being taught in a conservative manner. To teach such state sanctioned garbage only increases the risk that the adult that these children become will be twisted betond repair. Not as wishy-washy, do good, liberals but as thinking human beings!

There is a reason why the education of the young has been transformed in the last fifty years. It's because previous methods DID NOT WORK! We should have trust in our offspring; that they will make 'good' decisions, irrespective of the 'facts' we teach them.

Because we taught them to think!