We live in an age where con men -- and women -- rule the roost. The Ottawa Occupation was a con job par excellence. Patrick Gossage writes:
There is little doubt we have found out that the ideological leadership for the Ottawa Freedom Convoy was well-organized and funded and bent on challenging the government’s legitimacy to enact vaccine regulations that controlled their lives.
Their deluded stated purpose was to force the removal of all the COVID-19 restrictions applied by a tyrannical government led by the hated Justin Trudeau – even though most of them were instituted by the provinces.
The other irony of the Ottawa occupation, as it developed into a completely equipped village installed in front of the Parliament buildings, is that the majority of the demonstrators there in it were pretty ordinary, mostly young people and families, deluded into believing they were part of a larger patriotic freedom movement.
In the late 1960s, when I was training to be a teacher, most of us read a book by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner titled Teaching As a Subversive Activity. The authors maintained that good teachers should help their students develop what they called "crap detectors." They wrote:
We believe that the schools must serve as the principal medium for developing in youth the attitudes and skills of social, political, and cultural criticism.
Educators, they believed, should develop critical thinking skills in their students.
Beginning in the 1980s, conservatives sought to "reform" education. They changed curricula, insisting that students should be taught to do not to think. Lessons consisted of tasks that were broken into steps. Good students learned how to do the steps in the proper order. Thus, education became a matter of doing things according to a formula.
A good education, of course, should teach students how to do and how to think. Unfortunately, the Ottawa Occupation illustrates what happens when people have not been taught how to think. They become easy prey for con men, who have roamed the planet since the dawn of time.
Image: NOWCastsa
