Fact vs. Opinion

My 9-year-old son recently brought home a routine reading assignment in which he had to read a story and then answer some questions from the story.  He gets these almost every week, but this one caught my eye because the last question on the sheet was about the difference between "fact" and "opinion."  The story was about some animal helping another animal.  I can't remember what they were, but for the purposes of this retelling, we'll call them a squirrel and a frog.  The question was multiple choice and asked the student to pick out the "fact" amongst the "opinions."  The choices were along the lines of "the squirrel was nice to help the frog," "the squirrel shouldn't have helped the frog," and the "squirrel was bigger than the frog."  My son wanted to go with "the squirrel was nice" answer, so we had a discussion about what "facts" are and what "opinions" are.

I was glad this subject was even broached in today's modern third grade classroom, and wish more adults had to do the same kind of training.  It seems like we now live in a society where fact doesn't even really matter as long as you have opinion on your side.

For example, we know that abstinence only "education" is terribly useless, and does pretty much nothing to prevent sexual activity amongst teens, and therefore does not prevent teen pregnancy or the spreading of STI's.  How do we know this?  We've studied it. And yet, many people still insist that it should be taught because they are of the opinion that teen sex is the worst thing that could ever possibly happen.  But it's just not effective.  Fact vs. opinion.

We also know that evolution happened, and that the Earth is not, in fact, 6,000 years old, despite what the bible may have told you.  How do we know this? We've studied it. And yet, many people still hold the opinion that the bible is right, and that there is some sort of "controversy" we should be teaching kids about regarding evolution.

But my biggest problem with the juxtaposition of facts and opinion these days is in the political sphere. "Obama is a communist!" No, he's not.  That's an opinion based on your dislike of his policies, but it doesn't change the definition of communism and the fact that Obama's policy decisions don't support your belief. "Obamacare is a 'government takeover' of healthcare!" No, it's not. A true government takeover of healthcare would be a British-style national health service. But that's not what Obamacare does. You can dislike it all you want, but you can't claim the "government takeover" bit as a fact. Because it's not. End of story. Fact vs. opinion.

I think the political landscape would be very different if people could agree on which things are "facts" and which things simply are not.  We would still disagree on the "right" way to do things, because we would still have our differing "opinions," but maybe our conversations would be a lot less frustrating and more productive if we agreed to rely on actual evidence.

Parent Teacher Trouble

Before I begin, a technical note: I will be referring to "Obamacare" in this post.  If that bothers you, sorry.  I know the proper name of the law, I'm just too lazy to type it all out, and I think Obama should be proud of his law and own it.

So I had a weird situation the other day.  I attended my first parent-teacher conference of the year with my son's third grade teacher, who is an amazing woman.  In the short time I've known her, I've found her to be kind, funny, warm and smart.  She's kind of a "grandma" figure to the kids, and my son just loves her.

As the conference began, she asked me about my impending surgery since we've discussed it on and off when I've been in the classroom volunteering.  The conversation came around to medical bills, and she said she's been worrying about me because my medical bills must huge.  At that point, I told her that one good thing about "Obamacare" was that it would end the lifetime cap on coverage which would be huge for me. She agreed but then asked what would happen if it got repealed.

I should interject here to say that I really hesitated to even bring up the issue, because around here, you kind of have to assume that everyone is conservative until proven otherwise.  So it was a subject I broached very tentatively.

Anyway, as the discussion continued, she told me she had heard that there is a provision in Obamacare that pays for all the children of illegal immigrants to go to college for free.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I politely told her that seemed pretty unlikely to me, and asked her if maybe she was thinking of the "Dream Act" (which doesn't do that either, but I can see how the rumor could get around).  She insisted that no, it was in fact Obamacare, and that "we" (I'm assuming she and her husband?) had fact-checked it because they thought it sounded weird too.  I told her it still seemed fishy to me, and she asked me to let her know if I find out differently, at which point our time was about up, so I told her we should probably talk about my son (who, as it turns out, is an amazing, wonderfully kind and funny boy who really needs to work on his reading and math skills).

That night, I spent at least an hour googling and came across nothing, so I resorted to finding the entire text of the law and searching through it for keywords like "education," "immigrants," and "college" and still found nada.

The next day, I emailed the teacher letting her know what I had found (or rather not found).  I'm not sure how often she checks her email though, so I guess we'll see if she sends a response.

The point of this whole story is that even the most intelligent people can believe very unlikely things, and what that could mean for this election and for our future really kind of scares me.  We live in a world where facts aren't always facts, and you can just about always find somethting to back up what you want to believe, no matter what side of the fence you're sitting on.