Aufklärung

[franceslievens]

After every election I try to figure out what makes people vote for right-wing parties whose complete program consists of summing up what goes wrong with the current government. There are no solutions, only the constant drone of negative words. People must have such a negative view of the society they live in, to be drawn that way, to be so eager to make all the bad things go away overnight.
Or maybe they really are only uninformed. Teaching is a constant battle against half truths and whole mistakes, a constant struggle for enlightenment. You want to show them all the sides of the picture. You wish they'd believe they can start to fix things for themselves.
But then again, sometimes you wonder whether you aren't pressing your view upon them. And maybe the majority truly is always right.

Comments

[thephilfire.livejournal.com]

rubbish the majority is never always right. to back that up i'd like to use the george bush election as evidence but if i do it'll actually prove me wrong as it was the minority who voted for him.

for me teaching would be about teaching them the desire for knowledge, the desire to find things out for themselves, to always be curious and always ask questions.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

Of course the majority isn't always right. There is plenty of proof for that point of view.

And yes, I should make your second paragraph into my motto.

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of "We can't change things anyway" and "Those politicians are all the same" around. We'v even got a word for this: "Politikverdrossenheit".
Then some people come along who are very different from the other politicians: They present a scapegoat for what's wrong with the country - usually immigrants - and then offer an easy solution: send them away.
Things are of course a lot more complex than that and this complexity scares people.
Yep, helping pupils how to make sense of our complex world is definitely one of our most important goals. Sometimes it scares me how jaded some of the kids already are. They don't understand the texts right away and then they give up. It's too much of an effort if you believe that knowledge won't help you.

[frances-lievens.livejournal.com]

It's even more scary when I've got my 10-12 yo's doing things like that. "Don't understand it, so I'm not intersted."
The more clever ones, otoh, have their own version of fatalism: "It is like I say it is, because that person explained it to me." Oh the looks you get when you say the clever one isn't completely right and things can be looked at from a different point of view...