Exactly, the author of the article is retarded. >When I went to visit my son’s second grade open house, I found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read: >Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven. >Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes. >Hoping that this set of definitions was a one-off mistake, I went home and Googled “fact vs. opinion.” The definitions I found online were substantially the same as the one in my son’s classroom. As it turns out, the Common Core standards used by a majority of K-12 programs in the country require that students be able to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” I'm glad they teach that, it opens the mind to critical thinking skills. Plus those are the actual definitions. Sure it's simplified, but that's because it's target audience is seven year olds. If I went into Algebra 1, and the teacher was writing calculus equations all over the board, I'd be pissed. > The inconsistency in this curriculum is obvious. For example, at the outset of the school year, my son brought home a list of student rights and responsibilities. Had he already read the lesson on fact vs. opinion, he might have noted that the supposed rights of other students were based on no more than opinions. According to the school’s curriculum, it certainly wasn’t true that his classmates deserved to be treated a particular way — that would make it a fact. Alright, let's say that the rights the author is talking about is a right to not be bullied, for the sake of argument. The school, at some point, received complaints about students being bullied. The school looked into the complaints, and began to notice that, compared to non-bullied kids, the bullied kids had worse grades, lower self-esteem, and XYZ. After discussions with other authority figures, teachers who have seen the effects first hand, and bullied students, they came to the conclusion that bullying was very closely followed by upset and harmed students. They then decided to make bullying against the rules so other students wouldn't be harmed. True, this was based off of opinions, such as the the opinion of the teacher the the student was doing poorly after being bullied, and the authority figure's opinion that kids shouldn't be bullied in a place of learning. However, bullying is far too closely correlated with those negative effects, to risk placing the student's ability to learn and grow in jeopardy. The classmates deserve to not get bullied, not because it's a moral fact, but because the risks of potential side effects towards bullied students could have very far reaching consequences. > Similarly, it wasn’t really true that he had any responsibilities — that would be to make a value claim a truth. It should not be a surprise that there is rampant cheating on college campuses: If we’ve taught our students for 12 years that there is no fact of the matter as to whether cheating is wrong, we can’t very well blame them for doing so later on. Cheating is against the rules because if everyone cheated, then students would lose the motivation to learn material, and school would be pointless. How is this dude writing for the Times?