Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills 734
An anonymous reader writes "Texas Republican delegates met earlier this month to put together their 2012 platform. Much of this focused on the educational system. Alarmingly, they openly state that they oppose schools teaching critical thinking, on the grounds that it may challenge 'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority.' Page 12 of their official platform (PDF) discusses their thinking on teaching thinking."
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
As usual Slashdot puts up any and all propaganda that makes anyone but radical leftists look like lunatics.
The liberals did take a good page out of 1984 by learning how to warp and manipulate language to fit their own agenda. For example, relabel the same old provably ineffective (or intentionally worse than ineffective) teaching techniques as "logic" or "critical thinking". Now all of the sudden anyone who opposes the twisted and mangled brainwashing that is labeled "logic" or "critical thinking" is instantly a right-wing extremist Nazi who needs to be "volunteered" for a good liberal "reeducation sensitivity training course".
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
So, one would rather have a mindless zombie with the old style "dont question authority and stay on that production line" from the 50s.
Pray tell.. where did all the thinkers come from then?
You know why China's kids want to be more innovative and inventive like American kids? It is because they teach like you are preaching.
You want innovation, critical thinking, you want drones to put tube in hole, you teach as proposed by Texas.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
As a leftie, I still see some logic behind what the OP mentioned. Even though I do not agree with it (in fact, I find the last two paragraphs of attacks a bit offensive), I still find it odd that it was modded down as a troll.
Without context, it will sound like a red-team vs blue-team fight. I may need to read more to see where the specific contentious issues would be.
A bit OT, but some radical experiments in education are happening on the tech side -- udacity, coursera, etc. Not sure if they fall under 'progressive' (more like cool-techie-engineering solutions), and would be extremely disruptive to established interests both on the red and blue teams :)
Totally understandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
War is Peace.
freedom is not liberty.
and most of all.
Ignorance is strength.
As it is, critical thinking skills is reserved for top party members or the executives that work in the companies that the party supports.
Critical Thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that ability to look beyond dogma, hyperbole, straw-man arguments, etc. and make your own decisions. Small wonder anyone in political power would rigorously fight people learning to think for themselves, they may find their beliefs change over time and switch party affiliation or (horrors) become independents - evaluating candidates based upon their ability to get things done, rather than what they like to talk about at campaign events.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:0, Insightful)
The only thing that should be labelled troll is the summary. The "troll" poster is spot on.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Only to a neanderthal are "higher order thinking skills" considered "bullshit"
Religious fundamentalism (Score:0, Insightful)
The Texas GOP is just an American taliban in my opinion.
LOL! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Religious fundamentalism (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth is, that many of the pre-reagan GOPers are disgusted by where their party is today.
Misleading Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual quote is:
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.
It sounds like "Outcome-Based Education" is that you aren't graded by how many hours you spend learning or working, but by the output you can produce. So they're saying you could use this to brainwash students based on the teacher's political agenda? IE, at the end of the class you will show you understand his views, and why everyone else is wrong. When you put it like that, it doesn't seem so bad...
Of course, what they're really saying is don't challenge our creationist views with your fancy logic. And that's sad.
Re:Beat them don't teach them! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about letting teachers beat parents instead? It might actually be more effective.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
If by "neanderthal" you mean "genius on the level of Albert Einstein", then perhaps you'll begin to understand what he's saying.
What he's saying is that "Higher Order Thinking Skills" (note the capital letters and cute initialism) are not actually higher order thinking skills, much like the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" is neither democratic nor a republic.
wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
I barely made it through the first page of that thing. If I didn't know better, I would call it a poe's law prank.
Seriously, how does insanity like that shit (really "sanctity of life crom fertilization to grave"? The authority of the family "defined as a man and a woman", and all that rhetoric? Wow. Heil hitler fuckers. Oh wait, this is the us. "Praise jesus!". My bad.) Manage to get taken seriously in a country *FOUNDED* on independent thought and the outright refusal of state sponsored religion?
Holy fuck batman, joker's got a jackhammer jesus dildo!
Seriously. What. The. Fuck.
Re:Religious fundamentalism (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Critical Thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
It's that ability to look beyond dogma, hyperbole, straw-man arguments, etc. and make your own decisions.
And, you know, read a paragraph.
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.
You lose.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's the inflammatory language in your post that makes you a troll. It's obviously going to invoke hostile responses, which was possibly your intention.
If you have a valid point learn to make it like a reasonable grown-up. Otherwise your point will be discarded. Ever wonder why nobody listens to you IRL except those in your echo chamber? Well now you know.
Trollish summary (Score:5, Insightful)
If you actually look at the platform, the Texas Republicans' opposition is to the Outcome Based Education [wikipedia.org] philosophy. Proponents of this methodology sometimes label it "critical thinking skills" since after all, who doesn't favor that? The summary submitter (and about half of the comments at this point) fall into the same logical fallacy as "If you oppose the PATRIOT Act, you must oppose patriotism!", ironically due to a lack of critical thinking skills...
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
That's easy. jmorris42 is using the false correlation that students being taught to question everything is leading to students not learning to an adequate skill level, ignoring the huge lack of education spending and censored, jingoistic misinformation being taught. Thus he is proposing instead that students are taught to never question anything told to them, no matter what that might be, or how correct or not it may be, to accept at face value everything they see, and to never make up their own mind on anything.
Re:Misleading Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Real learning begins when the children leave off what they are fed and begin research of their own, "Why does this work/not work? Where do I find the information." Critical Thinking opens that door.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
I get this all the time. The definition of 'troll' seems to be 'anyone disagreeing with progressives' except it is also used on occasion to mod down the GNAA and other crap.
Except that you seem to seem to think that just because one stupid wave of "progressives" was wrong, no progressive approach is possible and teaching has to revert to the 19th century model of cramming bookfuls of facts mindlessly for the greater good of all. (If that's not what you have in mind, you failed to make it obvious, what with all those trolly references to "lefties" and "indoctrinating" etc.) You still haven't pointed out how having critical thinking skills is wrong for a student. Knowledge of informal logic, e.g, and proper reasoning skills to spot logical fallacies are immensely useful. The same goes for having an idea as to *how* science works, as opposed to just cramming the high-school digest of the results of past scientific works.
Re:Beat them don't teach them! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
My problem is not liberal ideals (which are mostly good). It's the fact they don't live up to them. They claim "We are a pro-choice party," and then turn around and take away freedom of choice by banning sodas (New York), movie theater popcorn (effective 2013), and catastrophic insurance plans (under obamacare).
Hmmm. Or they say, "We oppose the killing of our fellow human beings in foreign wars," and then turn round and start new wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria. (I'm confused.)
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
i'm a liberal and i agree with your point. it's just impossible to codify "critical thinking," even before you add the realities of education: overworked, underpaid and sub-meritorious teachers (btw, i think these problems are endemic to our society; privatization/voucherification will mostly just let parents choose among desired flavors of substandard nutjobbery) who will inevitably use a mix of personal biases and bureaucratic checklists to evaluate "criticalness."
unfortunately, the gop rejects science pretty much as an axiom (science != engineering, though they're both great), and this isn't new, see e.g. hayek's why i am not a conservative. i think that doing a good job of teaching science is the almost the only way to get to real critical thinking. it's not easy, and i don't think the Ds could manage it either, but from what i can see the gop just throws it out immediately.
i can't help thinking that we're just fucked.
and i recommend that everyone read the linked gop pamphlet. it's hilarious in its populist pandering; lines like ``We strongly oppose the listing of the dune sage brush lizard either as a threatened or an endangered species." are almost onion-like. yes, i'm sure that the dems' pamphlets are also full of silliness, but this is the exhibit of the day.
READ MY POST (Score:3, Insightful)
Someone disagrees or misunderstands you and your immediate reaction is to should obscenities and abuse. What sort of education did you get? You obviously weren't taught any manners.
but I’ll tell you what they don’t want (Score:2, Insightful)
. . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting focked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitt!er jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money.
---RIP G. Carlin
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
Do not fool yourself: through the tenuring process your values will change and you will feel you are special (and by special I mean 'better' than the rest of 'normal' people).
Frankly, that sounds a lot like Wall Street, and the "financial elite". I'm trying to figure out how being valued for your knowledge and wisdom became a bad thing in this country.
Re:wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
"sanctity of life crom fertilization to grave"
Actually, it's only from the moment of conception to the moment of birth. After that, tough shit if you starve, die from a treatable disease, get shot by someone from a higher social class, die in a war for the benefit of the rich and powerful, or get executed for a crime you didn't commit.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
And this is why the left in the US is completely being clobbered by the right. Too often insults, redefinitions and logical fallacies by the conservatives are met by "well, if I can figure out what they're really saying, we can maybe come to an agreement" by what amounts to the left. In other words, they're being nice in response to what is basically bullying.
Here's the problem: anyone who argues like the initial poster is not looking for a rational discourse, for an enlightening discussion, or even for a solution to a problem. They are merely looking to get enough people onto their side.
Definitely read up on the issue. But don't mistake the original post for an opening in a an honest discussion. It isn't.
I want kids, not pets (Score:5, Insightful)
Alarmingly, they openly state that they oppose schools teaching critical thinking, on the grounds that it may challenge 'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority.'
As a parent, I don't want complete unquestioned authority over my kids' thoughts. I've made a long-standing habit of flat out lying to my kids and getting them to catch me in it. When one of them says, "Dad, I think you just made that up", then I think I've done my job as a parent.
That doesn't mean I want complete, unquestioned disrespect. To channel my dad, it's my house and my rules. But I fully expect to have to defend my opinions to my kids. Even if they ultimately disagree with my point of view, at least I've taught them why I believe the way I do. And if I'm not able to satisfactorily explain and defend those opinions, maybe I need to reconsider them.
Re:Trollish summary (Score:5, Insightful)
They are explicitly saying that they oppose this HOTS/OBE/whatever because, I quote, it "have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." I don't care what OBE is. It may well be that it can and should be challenged on common sense grounds. But these dicks are saying that they're challenging it because it doesn't let them indoctrinate their kids.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you attach too much meaning to ideology. It doesn't work that way. You can be a dweeb and nail everybody to the wall for being "hypocritical" but it's completely unproductive and ignores the fact that laws are passed by people who are elected by people, and are meant to address political demands. They know they're not being consistent and they don't care. Consistency is for restaurants and Nazis.
I'm sorry if you've misappropriated one slogan on one issue ("pro-choice") and decided to use it as some sort of predicate to judge every policy objective leftists have. There are any number or rightist slogans ("limited government", "fiscal responsibility", "sacredness of life") that are similarly fraught. That's just how it works -- healthy people don't join political movements for ideology, they join them to accomplish common goals through collective action.
And since when was Michael Bloomberg a liberal?
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
They want students to believe whatever they're told to believe, and never question it.
I doubt it. I imagine they very much want Muslim students to question their beliefs. What you probably mean is that they want students to believe whatever Christian and conservative doctrine they're told and never question it.
Re:READ MY POST (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing he was taught who George Washington was and how to find the US, but little about applying critical thinking to a discussion. And he clearly prefers it that way.
Maybe he's right about "higher order thinking skills" being broadly applied as a label for general (and not well tested) education reforms; I wouldn't know. But encouraging children to challenge their fixed beliefs is crucial in my books, even if it potentially undermines parental authority (speaking as a parent myself). Any party that explicitly discourages that should be kept well away from positions of authority.
A "different" Critical Thinking Skills (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this the right thing to do?
Is this the right time to do this?
Is this the right person to do this to/with?
etc.
You get the point. Decisions that we make daily we tend to take for granted because of our (mostly) fully functional mental capabilities. Challenged persons do not have that same level and must be taught how critical thinking.
BTW, he graduated with honors and made me one proud Dad.
Re:Totally understandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
not a troll; the poster speaks the raw truth. hard to swallow if you are on the other side, but it really is true.
current republicans are the poster children of doublespeak.
clinging to 2000 year old mythology does not help their case, either. its part of the problem, in fact.
modern man needs to pull himself out of this religious stupor. the more you try to keep this myth and 'us vs them' mentality going, the more you set us all, collectively, back.
the word 'progress' is in progressive. note that progressive movement is 100% opposite of the current republican and so-called conservative movements. some of us want to move forward while quite a lot of americans are hell-bent (heh) on keeping us back in the middle ages.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
a neo-statist approach
Actually, a statist approach would be a conservative approach. After all, that's exactly what conservative means.... conserving the current state, sticking to historical habits, etc. And again, you illustrate my point beautifully: no one's calling you on your bullshit redefinition of what it means to be conservative.
The left's intellectual foundation is the universities where most social science profs and their students have for four decades or more been left-leaning if not Marxist.
1) What's wrong with working at universities?
2) What's wrong with being left?
3) You're employing a tautology to imply a negative connotation with being left-leaning. In other words, you're demonizing your opposition as not even being able to have a valid opinion.
4) You have no idea what a Marxist is. As a matter of fact, you don't even know what a political center is.
Obama represents that tradition; he comes from the ivory tower culture, he thinks of the rural whites as "clinging to their guns and religion", and he brooks no disagreement.
Argument from assertion. Not to mention that "he brooks no disagreement" is a hilarious position to take after George "I'm the decider" Bush was never once challenged on anything by the conservative "small government" people.
, but if you spend some time in the Southwest and the western states, except for the Pacific coastal region, you find a persistent culture of leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.
Is that what you call people who fire gays for being gay, who try to tell people what to do in the bedroom, and who will also consider you a lesser human if you believe in the wrong book? There's a big difference between an economical and a social laissez-faire position.
Rightly or wrongly, this is what they want whether they admit it or not.
Now you're implying you know someone's "true" mind, even if it contradicts what they're saying or doing. In other words, you are making shit up about a person, just so that you can lump them in a particular group.
Some of our greatest thinkers in decades past came off the farm, grew up going to a one room schoolhouse, spent more time out of doors than in a library, and so forth, yet this didn't seem to hold them back.
Argument from example. For every Abe Lincoln, there was a Ben Franklin.
They developed a uniquely American kind of independent thinking relatively free from the peer pressure of the eastern university environment.
Argument from myth. American exceptionalism is just like English, German, French, Chinese, or even Icelandic exceptionalism: a post-hoc justification for uniqueness based on a mythical interpretation of an abstract origin story and national character creation.
Yeah. The only thing you're missing is the common insults. Although at this point, for some people, calling someone Marxist is exactly that.
Finally....
The opening post is an expression of anger and frustration at elements of our society who want to reprogram children to be more "open" to their particular world views.
I'm amazed that teaching critical thinking, as opposed to memorization, is now "reprogramming". Not to mention that I find your implication hilarious: that they were already programmed. In other words, you're just complaining that your programming is being overwritten with someone else's program.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
Fascism arose as
competition
to communism.
It competed by co-opting some of the appealing economic ideas from communism, while promising to save the national ethnic identities that communism wished to erase.
Fascism and communism are both totalitarian ideologies that still have much in common despite their differences.
Think of the difference between the Catholicism and Protestantism. Similar theologies, yet still different enough that they waged many a war with each other.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe we should try to frame the problem here better and get out of this massive exercise in left wing/right wing trolling and counter trolling. This is not an interesting discussion so far. I often wonder is this deterioration in discourse:
A) Deterioration of /. discourse
B) Deterioration and polarization of American discourse
C) Deterioration of global discourse, and this Internet things is actually not all good
D) Discourse has always sucked, its just getting really obvious thanks to the Internet
One problem with education is we've turned our system in to a bunch of monoliths where state school boards, political parties and ivory tower liberal intellectuals get to dictate cirriculum and teaching methods to millions of unfortunate kids who are locked in to public schools in a particular state and cant afford to escape to private schools with cirricula of their choice.
Believe it or not all of those kids are actually different. Some of them would probably thrive in Montessori schools learning higher order thinking skills (lower case since using HOTS is apparently trolling). They might go on to found Amazon and Google and become global leaders.
Some kids will be lucky to manage memorizing crap for 12 years, make it out with a diploma, and find a high paying career in factory work, burger flipping or roughnecking.
We do actually need more people with higher order thinking skills, intense creativity and the ability and willingness to challenge entrenched thinking. Competing for low wage factory jobs with the Chinese is not something to aspire to.
One solution I wish could happen would be to move education entirely online and let parents and, gasp!, children gravitate to the curricula and methodologies that work for them. The one key benefit is kids wouldn't be locked in to the rigid ideologies of the school boards and communites they happen to be stuck living in, whether it be left or right wing. The coolness of the Internet is people from all over the world can get together and do interesting things together, and escape the trap of locality.
The reason this wont work is, face it, public schools today are primarily to provide subsidized day care since the new economy demands both parents work full time unless they are affluent. The affluent then go to private schools. Schools are also there to socialize kids and you kind of need to lock them all in rooms together with authority figures dictating societal doctrine to do that. Actual dducation is at least third on the list if not lower.
And since this comment is already too long part II will be in a different post
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
he doesn't mean that "higher order thinking skills" are bullshit.. he said that the terms "higher order thinking skills" "logic" "critical thinking" and others have been coopted by the left as compliance with their ideology. largely, he's correct, but the neocon right does this too in their institutions. it's too bad really.. having real, age appropriate logic and critical thinking skills classes in every grade would go a long way to fix the problems we have. they would give a higher level bullshit filter to every citizen for use in detecting propaganda.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Questioning everything is merely the beginning of the journey of scientific knowledge.
The point of the process is that every acting theory should have a well-defined set of failure criteria, result data from previous experiments, and steps to reproduce the results should anyone care to challenge the theory. Anyone is free to question the body of results so far, but to be taken seriously at all, he/she must provide a new body of result data which contradicts the theory and steps to reproduce it so others can verify it.
The problem is that most of the time you see a scientific theory in the news, the GOP stops at the first step - questioning anything that conflicts with their worldview. If global warming or evolution or gravitation or relativity or radioactive decay rates or whatever else have holes, I'm sure at a loss in finding the experimental data from people trying to disprove them. Sure, in some cases, it's a specialized- or trivial- enough spec of the natural world that no one bothers to exert much effort to discount existing theory, but are you suggesting global warming is without challengers?
I don't think I can go longer than a few months without seeing some new finding that "disproves" global warming, only to be discredited later. The reason public discourse has now shifted to how severe the results of global warming may be is because the (very well-funded) groups trying to disprove global warming have nothing to show for their work, and perhaps they have thrown in the towel.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
Funny thing is, I think the far right would have just as much a problem with "higher order thinking skills" as they appear to have with "Higher Order Thinking Skills", especially given the part at the end, "... and have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority." I think that last part is why anyone more towards the middle of the political spectrum might misinterpret what the GOP was explicitly saying and might legitimately believe that between the lines, the GOP really is opposing critical thinking skills. Can't have the littl'uns questionin' authority or back-talkin' their Momma and Daddy.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
"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) "
So, class, do "they" oppose all Higher Order Thinking Skills or just those that are relabeled Outcome Based Education? Where do you suppose "they" would have put the period if the goal of the sentence was to portray opposition to all HOTS?
Use your critical thinking skills and reading comprehension. Once you figured it out and come to terms with the fact that it's doesn't actually say what the trolls want you to think it says, you may go to recess.
As a bonus, you can write a few paragraphs discussing what it says about Slashdot that most everyone is so ready to believe what the original poster wanted them to believe.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Totally understandable. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. If one is able to embrace the nonsense of religion, any other lie is second nature.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoaa dude, take a breath. You're going to give yourself an a aneurysm.
Two things. First, regardless of what you think about "fixed beliefs", the implication the GP was making is fallacious. Even if we accept the axiom that "A does not imply B", it does not necessarily follow that "A implies not B". Replace "A" with "opposing a program call HOTS (TM)" and "B" with "opposes actual higher order thinking skills". Just because they oppose HOTS doesn't mean they oppose actual critical thinking. But conversely it doesn't necessarily mean they don't either.
Second, Reductio ad absurdum [wikipedia.org] much? <sarcasm>Yes that's clearly what I was proposing</sarcasm>. Please. How about I characterize your argument as
"Why bother teaching any critical thinking skills at all. Whatever dumb-ass thing little Billy wants to believe is just fine. Think the world is flat? No problem! Convinced you'll catch cooties if you hold hands with a girl? Hey if you believe it, it must be true."
Look, critical thinking skills sometimes require you to think critically about your established beliefs. If you're not allowed to do anything that might challenge an established belief you're not going to get very far.
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Breathless summary by the clueless (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Critical Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
That is what the paragraph says when you cut away the jargon, so let's discuss the substance, not terms.
Re:Totally understandable. (Score:3, Insightful)
For some reason every time we teach someone how to think critically and properly evaluate ideas on their merit, they vote for the other party's policies! It's a flipping mystery. Must be some sort of propaganda!
Must be the same reason why that no-good "intellectual elite" are always voting for left-wing policies. If only we could find some sort of correlation...