Originally published on July 10, 2013 by Keelan Balderson at EyesWideShut
A new extra-curricular history program taught in Carroll County, Baltimore, USA, is warning students not to get sucked in to 9/11 conspiracy theorizing and that the official Government approved narrative is the only version with any “credence”.
The summer course offered to middle-schoolers aged around 11 years old is one of the first classes to go in depth with the subject with children, some of who were not alive when the tragedy took place.
“That is the first time I have talked about it in front of a group of more than five or six,” said teacher Mike Chrvala. In the past decade, discussing the day has gotten easier, he explained.
Carroll County holds free enrichment classes each year on subjects that include art, playwriting and science. Dick Thompson, the county’s coordinator of the summer courses, thought a class on 9/11 could provide important lessons for children born after the event. It is not taught in great depth during the school year – reports the Baltimore Sun newspaper.
Unsurprisingly the class strongly adheres to the official Government narrative, glossing over “conspiracy theories” as nonsense and praising the controversial Patriot Act and post 9/11 security measures.
Casey Jillson, 12, said the attacks weren’t just “a bad thing” because the US has implemented tighter security measures. “Our country learned to be more secure and safe,” she explained.
Chrvala hopes his students will “become little torchbearers to teach about 9/11,” though it seems they will only be regurgitating the contextless and bias story cherry-picked and spun together by the Bush Administration.
This isn’t the first or last school class that ignores the Bush Administration’s pre-planned invasion of Afghanistan, and the vast amount of data that shows that elements of the Government had foreknowledge of the attacks and “failed” to prevent the plot at key points, such as the granting of the alleged hijacker’s US Visas despite them failing to correctly fill out applications.
Such alternative information is considered dangerous by Western Governments, with Obama’s former information Tsar Cass Sunstein advocating “cognitive infiltration” of theorists, and the UK’s DEMOS think tank suggesting so called “critical thinking” be taught in schools so children can counter “radicalizing” conspiracy theories.
Of course not every wild “space beam” theory has credence, but if true “critical thinking” is to form the basis of children’s education, Government theories should be put under just as much scrutiny as the alternatives.