Educational Doublethink and the Development of Character


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Soon the United States Senate will consider legislation concerning human cloning. The bill likely to pass the democrat controlled Senate is one that would allow human cloning to produce embryos whose stem cells would be harvested for research. The stated goal of this research is to produce stem cells that might be useful in treating conditions like Parkinson's disease. It is well established that adult stem cells and those in umbilical cord blood are also excellent for research purposes. Why then use stem cells from embryos?

The answer to this question is twofold. First, any enforced restrictions placed on the manipulation of someone's life during his first nine months could threaten the multi-million dollar abortion industry. Those who have a financial, and more importantly a moral and psychological stake in the culture of abortion will not allow this to happen. Secondly, the underlying goal of embryonic research is the tampering of the whole process of life, from genetic engineering to cloning. Some researchers openly admit that they are trying to create a “better” person, a “cleaner” next generation. Birth control advocates and the abortionists, notably groups like Planned Parenthood, have been in bed with the eugenicists for some time. For anyone who doubts this fact I suggest that they read Margaret Sanger's The Pivot of Civilization.

While a full-blown, Huxley-like manipulation of successive generations of newborns only looms on the horizon, embryonic research is doing real damage to our children right now. Allowing experimentation on embryos, like abortion on demand, forces our children to accept a number of scientific and philosophical contradictions. For example, starting at the junior high/high school level we teach our students that scientifically it is agreed that human life begins at conception. If this is true, how can a human embryo not be a human life? And if a human embryo is a human life, by what right do we hold someone's life in limbo, experiment on him, and manipulate his future? As small as we were as embryos, we were all alive, we all had life. Have we forgotten the lessons of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who?

Again, as a stock component of any social studies course, we teach our youth that all men are created equal with certain inalienable, God-given rights, among which are the right to life and liberty. However, the allowance of embryonic research denies that we have a natural right to life. If life must meet certain standards of size, physical fitness, or desirability to be considered a fully human life, then why was slavery every abolished? Why then all the to-do concerning the Holocaust?

These sorts of questions are not merely rhetorical. The continuation of embryonic research forces our youth to endure a system of educational doublethink — a system in which we insist that our students believe that two clearly incongruous ideas (one that life begins at conception, and two that life begins only when we say so) are both true. The immediate by-product of this doublethink is a strange and confusing ethos for our students to digest. This ethos suggests to our children that there is no absolute wrong and that which is right is fluid and negotiable. A product of this fluidity is the notion that legality is the equivalent of morality. In short, if it is legal, is must be OK. Again, the difficulty of explaining the evil of slavery or the Holocaust rears its head. As surreal as it may seem, each day in our schools peddlers of this peculiar ethos instruct our children that one should go to jail for breaking the egg of a bald eagle, but one might rightly profit and prosper from murdering children at any time during their first nine months of life.

It is in the long run that this system of doublethink does the most damage to our students. Educational doublethink hinders a child's character development. Education in the United States has always been as much about character development as has been about economic advancement, and for good reason. To teach someone how to amass material wealth but fail to teach him what to do with it is to do a disservice to that person. More to the point, any system of doublethink retards the development of a child's thought process, clouding his judgment and endangering the future of us all.

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