Just like when teachers decided that children needed 'death education', and this led to suicides among other people's kids. Remember that? I'd never heard of it and only learned about it in an old Sowell book.
I've never heard of this. Could you explain it briefly?
This is from one of the few Sowell books that I have read only once (Inside American Education), so my recollection may not be great, and take the following with a grain of salt.
Basically, in the early 1990s, due to the great success of sex education in raising the teenage pregnancy and STD rate, teachers decided that children had to get 'death education', because how could they deal with death without the aid of teachers 'educating' them about it.
So they unleashed 'death education' on children. They showed them with videos that were supposed to teach them how to deal with death, and had visits to graveyards and basically weird stuff. Despite evidence that this was greatly disturbing to the children, and despite suicides from children who could ironically could not deal with this 'death education'.
Afterwards, it was never heard of again. The fad passed just as quickly as it had arrived, with families of dead children left to pick up the pieces. As usual, they paid no price for being wrong, other people suffered for their mistakes. And it's wiped from the historical record, so they don't even have to pay the reputational price for it.
Interesting. I actually took a class called Death and Dying in my senior year of high school. I took it because at the time I wanted to go into forensic psychology, and it seemed like a decent elective to fill my schedule with, along with my forensics, and medical lab classes.
I don't remember a ton about that class. I remember that we watched a lot of movies that dealt with death, like My Girl,A Walk to Remember,Tuesdays With Morrie, etc. We also went on a field trip to a historic cemetery in my home city. There was also a research project where we each had to do a presentation on a past or present culture's funeral rites.
It was a mildly interesting class, but I was a high school student. I get the feeling that the children that Thomas Sowell was talking about were much younger.
I've never heard of this. Could you explain it briefly?
This is from one of the few Sowell books that I have read only once (Inside American Education), so my recollection may not be great, and take the following with a grain of salt.
Basically, in the early 1990s, due to the great success of sex education in raising the teenage pregnancy and STD rate, teachers decided that children had to get 'death education', because how could they deal with death without the aid of teachers 'educating' them about it.
So they unleashed 'death education' on children. They showed them with videos that were supposed to teach them how to deal with death, and had visits to graveyards and basically weird stuff. Despite evidence that this was greatly disturbing to the children, and despite suicides from children who could ironically could not deal with this 'death education'.
Afterwards, it was never heard of again. The fad passed just as quickly as it had arrived, with families of dead children left to pick up the pieces. As usual, they paid no price for being wrong, other people suffered for their mistakes. And it's wiped from the historical record, so they don't even have to pay the reputational price for it.
It showed up in some of my highschool textbooks. My favorite was a questions, "how can a suicide hotline help you with suicide?"
I made an entire sketch about it.
Interesting. I actually took a class called Death and Dying in my senior year of high school. I took it because at the time I wanted to go into forensic psychology, and it seemed like a decent elective to fill my schedule with, along with my forensics, and medical lab classes.
I don't remember a ton about that class. I remember that we watched a lot of movies that dealt with death, like My Girl, A Walk to Remember, Tuesdays With Morrie, etc. We also went on a field trip to a historic cemetery in my home city. There was also a research project where we each had to do a presentation on a past or present culture's funeral rites.
It was a mildly interesting class, but I was a high school student. I get the feeling that the children that Thomas Sowell was talking about were much younger.