Neruda will have to wait. I just saw this infuriating piece of nonsense today.
http://www.austinchronicle.com/blogs/news/2012-06-27/gop-opposes-critical-thinking/
Here's Richard Whitaker of the Austin Chronicle quoting from the Texas GOP's official platform.
"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."
First off, what the hell is "Knowledge-Based Education?" As opposed to what, Guess-Work-Education? Pleasant-Lies-Based Education? Jesus Camp? I thought education was about in creasing knowledge, about self, about the world, about the universe, etc.
Secondly, as infuriating as it is to read, I am glad the GOP is finally coming out of the closet on what they are really trying to do--undermine the public's ability to participate in our democracy by keeping people ignorant.
As for challenging fixed beliefs, if educators don't do that, they aren't doing their jobs.
I take extra time to teach critical thinking in my freshman-composition course. I teach writing as thinking, and good writing as good thinking. But what the heck is "good thinking?" I tend to qualify it along the lines of the old cliche, "questioning authority," but Paulo Friere, one of my idols, tends to phrase it more as "locating contradictions." Students often aren't aware, especially young students, of the many assumptions they carry with them and use to navigate the world. By spotlighting our assumptions, we can not only come to know ourselves better, but also learn about our oppressors more. By challenging those assumptions, we engage in the act of re-creating the world, from the individual up. Good thinking is the kind of thinking that examines the world with an eye for things that don't make sense, and then attempting to remake the world in a more true way.
One of education's major goals (besides informing students about the world) should be to create liberated individuals. There are enough forces in the world seeking to create oppressed individuals, and forces that oppress them. Opposing critical thinking helps keep society evolving. If we oppress the mind, we oppress the person. If we oppress people, we oppress society as a whole, and stifle the evolution of the entire human species.
My bias should be apparent already. I hope the Republican party gets voted out of office, across the board, this election season. Not that the Democrats are ostensibly any better. I have always liked Matt Taibbi's summation of the differences between the two parties: They're essentially the same party; the Democrats are just willing to throw the poor a little more.
But with the Republicans gone, that's one less major force standing in the way of social progress. Republicans have been controlling the debate for decades, making it about religiously-originating "values" when we should really be talking about empirical things: the environmental wasteland we are letting our businesses create in the name of profit, the economic exploitation of the labor of most Americans, ethic and gender discrimination, war and globalization, the takeover of government by industry, yatta yatta--things that spread suffering across our country and the globe on a real, observable level.
Who gives a damn about gay marriage? How is that more important than undrinkable water, plummeting fish populations, honeybee extinctions, deforestation, and global warming doomsday within sight?
And perhaps, as icing on the cake, a little dignity can be restored to American politics, as the Democratic Party, that long-standing amalgamation of people who can agree that they are Not Republican but on little else, fragments along more meaningful ideological lines. Then perhaps we can have intelligent debate in politics again.
I don't want to fall into an anti-GOP rant, but I do want to express how truly, undeniably, egregiously idiotic it is to oppose critical thinking skills. If anything should be signalling the death-knell of the Republicans, their outward stance against critical thought should be a siren at midnight.
J
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