We always start with what we know. We know Matt Gaetz is guilty of something. We know that he played up the Q conspiracy on his own ends and for his own ends. We know that he is likely guilty of the same things that he was accusing others of doing. It makes no sense to write an entire post about these things we know. We already know it.

These things are troubling and yet it is not these things that trouble me. Eventually we get to the point where we recognize that evil exists in the world. We may even get to the point where we recognize evil in certain people before the world acknowledges it. In fact, psychologists tell us that most sexual assault victims had an uneasy feeling about their attacker  before the attack. For whatever reason, they chose to ignore that feeling. I can only assume that same intuition exists beyond immediate predators and those we just see on television.

The fact is that most people are better judges of character than what they think. Reports have come out now that even Republicans refused to have their picture taken with Gaetz. They knew something like this was coming. Of course, when he’s busy showing off naked pictures of girls he knows and playing Harry Potter inspired sex games then it isn’t difficult to see something horrible coming down the pike.

The question for today is how we teach all of our children these important life lessons. I promise we try to teach students about the importance of choosing good sources for information. I’ve sat in the room when teachers have gone over the difference between heavily biased sources and sources that are more reliable. I’ve watched as we have identified left leaning sources and right leaning sources. Wikipedia and YouTube were never suggested as reliable sources.

Yet, years later you see many of these same people quoting these same dubious sources when they talk about the widespread sex trafficking problem. Some of that is to be expected. I still remember getting my sources from the card catalog. Our English teachers made us write down the quotes from each source onto index cards and then wrote down all of the pertinent information about the source as well so we could build a bibliography from scratch. It’s easy to imagine people from this generation propagating crap from the internet.

Unfortunately, we are still far too busy teaching the STAAR test to spend time making sure kids understand the differences between biased and unbiased sources. In science classes we don’t spend nearly enough time helping students be on the lookout for junk science. Not enough students take basic statistics. Don’t even get me started on social studies and what we are doing in there. Yet, conservatives have the audacity to accuse of us indoctrinating students. Again, we accuse others of what we do ourselves.

The state curriculum is built on what the test tests for. The test doesn’t test students based on these skills. So, these skills only get taught if teachers are determined to teach it on their own. Many of the teachers I know do that, but I certainly can’t speak for everyone and I won’t even try to vouch for the majority. I can only hope each generation becomes more internet savvy than the last. Otherwise we are in a lot of trouble.