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[summer_in_TX]

140. Absolutely. My sons (now in their early forties) don't understand fallacies.

They believe ad hominem and straw man arguments are valid.

I retired 14 years ago as an elementary special ed teacher of reading and math. One requirement is that each child qualifying for special education services has and IEP, an Individualized Education Plan. We sped teachers built those using the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) appropriate to the greatest needs our students had in learning.

For years my go-to for students with reading comprehension issues was for them to be able to figure out character feelings and motivations from their behavior in stories. That was no longer even included in the TEKS at least by my last year of teaching (2010-'11). So yes, dumbing down was occurring in curriculum requirements under Republican control. And they considered social and emotional learning (SEL) to be somehow suspect, instead of designed to build empathy. Texas Republicans even condemned it in at least one of their party platforms.