The Pugnacious Irishman has a rather disturbing story about the extent of relativism found in high schools–even he was teaching a class that was about 1/3 Latino, many of his students were unwilling to say that it is objectively wrong to say that blacks and Latinos are inferior to whites. Their mantra was “well, I don’t agree with you, but that’s just your opinion.”

The number of times the word “opinion” comes up in the story suggests that it is much of the source of the trouble–in our school system, students are taught that there is a distinction between “facts” and “opinions” which must be respected, and the distinction often seems to be given way more philosophical import than it deserves. This particular group of students seems to have gotten it into their heads that if something is an “opinion,” it can’t be true or false. I wonder how much of the relativism in the world today can be attributed to this one notion. Thankfully, it’s easy to combat: “The U.S. government will go bankrupt by the end of the century” is a classic case of an opinion, but either it’ll happen or it won’t, and by the end of the century we’ll know the answer.