No Santa Claus in your house, I guess.

Of course, there are some other answers. One could discipline the child without reference to right and wrong, I suppose, simply stating that this or that conduct annoys me, and that I am the (arbitrary and despotic) ruler of (your) universe. I would like to meet the person with the personality that could pull that off. Maybe there are some other answers I’m not thinking of right off.

Really, I don’t mean to be argumentative. I’d like to see the idea explained and fleshed out.

Are you actually delusional enough to believe that?

How does this teaching proceed? If it consists of “We are xyz party people, right or wrong” or “God said this, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar”, then damn straight it’s wrong. The fact that most of the world does it doesn’t change that.
Children are exceptionally gullible beings. The appropriate way to handle that is to teach them to think critically, then expose them to a wide variety of opinions. There are precious few political and religious indoctrinations that work that way.

Talk about Orwellian.

That these sentiments are meaningless is shown by the fact that 30 years of “environmental awareness” resulted in bigger houses and vehicles, that they are Orwellian is seen in that many of these seem people thought themselves blameless in that they attacked the sinister forces really responsible.

The right engages in the same sort of nonsense, indeed we have examples of sympathetic magic where the right really believes that ungood thoughts on Iraq, the economy and everything else cause problems.

But all of this is detrimental to the building of mines.

At some point these kids need to see a reality where the awfulness of Dresden and Hiroshima are seen and also the awfulness of the concentration camps, the Japanese invasion of China and all the rest and to see there is no simple answer.

They need to see the beauty of Gandhi and the half million butchered after his death along with King and the riots.

Soul tearing complexity.

Probably not third grade stuff.

….As well it should be. If the public education system is to retain public support (which it has barely clung to in America in any event, given the powerful strain of anti-intellectualism in the culture), then it must restrict itself to teaching only completely uncontroversial material. Those who argue otherwise are simply opening the door to an even worse result—a kind of educational cacaphony in which the propagation of nonsense displaces, and ends up swamping, genuine education. It’s much easier, after all, for parents to supply children with material they’ve missed than to try to disabuse them of falsehoods they’ve unwittingly absorbed.

Personally, I believe that the theory of evolution is an essential cornerstone of modern biology, and that “intelligent design” and its ilk have no place in a science class. But I would rather teach my children about evolution myself, with no help from public schools, than have them subjected to ID or similar pseudoscience in the classroom. Likewise, while I consider an understanding of current events and politics an important part of any child’s education, I’d rather the schools leave current events alone entirely than risk a repeat of the Madison experience in my neighborhood.

Of course, America is the land of the imperial Supreme Court—a place where democracy is something one pays lip service to, while looking for the most effective non-democratic means to shove one’s own will down everyone else’s throat. It’s not surprising, then, that most people see the school system as a perfectly appropriate vehicle for their own agendas—without stopping to consider what happens if their vehicle gets hijacked by their most feared opponents.

They barely know how to read and write ( and some won’t learn by the time they get to my college class).

Let kids be kids, teach them to read , please!

If you’re going to write letters to various people, recommend something more specific – “withdraw our troops from Iraq” or “send more troops to Iraq”.

(Of course I think a project expecting kids to engage in a letter-writing campaign over a pre-determined political objective is a very bad assignment regardless of how specific your recommendation is.)