GOP Error is Our Gain: Critical Thinking
Let's Put Our Thinking Caps On
I think I remember a kids show from the 1950's ("Romper Room?" "Miss Francis?") in which the host looked you right in the eyes and told all the kids watching that it was time to "Put Your Thinking Caps On". According to early reports, a group of politicians doesn't share the same passion for thinking.
The media, rightly so, has jumped all over the inital inclusion of a plank in the 2012 Texas Republican platform that opposes critical thinking
“Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”
This must be a joke, I thought. King of Critical Thinking, Steven Colbert, even found it bit-worth:Colbert Clip - The Word.
Well, it has now been reported by Texas GOP leadership that this plank was an error and should NOT have been included. There is no mechanism for amending the platform once the convention has ended, accourding to a state GOP official.
Being a person who often makes mistakes in writing I can understand and the GOP explanation. At least I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. I personally know the tyranny borne of knot prough-reeding kurectly.
But, this does alert us to think about critical thinking as we ramp up this election year. The omniscient Wikipedia says:
Critical thinking is thinking that questions assumptions.It is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true, partly true, or false.
I fall strongly on the side of encouraging everyone to use critical thinking. There is a great little book about the Holocost called "How Do You Kill 11,000,000 People?" The paraphrased answer: keep them from critical thinking! Nazi's got Jews, Poles and others to board death trains by telling them: "We are just taking you for a ride to a better place where you will be much safer and better off." They fell for it. Over and over, I suppose, because they wanted to believe it and were afraid of what they might discover if they used the weapon of critical thinking.
And so, critical thinking is not just a philisophical pursuit. It saves us. Reminds me of the New Testament's: "The Truth will set you free."
Over the next few months - 3 months and 12 days to be exact - we will be innundated (did I spell that right?) with political campaign promises, claims, warnings, "facts", etc., all meant to influence us to vote for a local, state or federal candidate that "wants to take us to a better place".
What a great time to remember to do critical thinking. To question what we hear. To question what WE think. It's a golden opportunity to put our thinking caps on!
How about you? Do you think critical thinking SHOULD BE taught in school Should students be taught to challenge conventional thought? Will you set and example or jump on board the train?
Put YOUR thinking cap on and let me know what you think!
Eric Joseph Lieberman, Candidate for 18th District State Representative
ejlieberman@gmail.com
Deadcatbounce
11:09 pm on Wednesday, August 1, 2012
critical thinking! Is that what you think schools are teaching?
That's not what I see in the curriculum, but rather a simple zero-sum melodrama of victims and oppressors. Education has become an elaborate scheme to deprive young people their freedom of thought. quoting David Mamet ... He compared schools to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way. My local school teaches kids that business is evil and is responsible for pollution!
“If we identify every interaction as having a victim and an oppressor, and we get a pellet when we find the victims, we’re training ourselves not to see cause and effect,” he said. Wasn’t there, he went on, a “much more interesting . . . view of the world in which not everything can be reduced to victim and oppressor?”
Eric Lieberman
11:50 pm on Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Dead Cat - Woah there! I had a little trouble following your thoughts...but I certainly don't think the public schools are doing much of a job teaching critical thinking. But doing a bad job and banning it altogether are different things. Right? I think we are in vociferous agreement!
Deadcatbounce
12:16 pm on Thursday, August 2, 2012
You're right, doing a bad job and banning it altogether are different. I just would think schools and even universities would support critical thinking with real conviction and action. When I see a junior high social studies curriculum built around bashing corporations as greedy and polluters, I see these people have an agenda they are trying to get across rather than educating students to see cause and effect. These teachers are just hypocrits as their job is dependent on these same employees of evil corporations paying their salaries by way of property taxes. Sorry to vent and keep on writing about interesting ideas and difficult issues. As I can see you're not the same old party candidate steeped in the status quo :)