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Texas GOP Educational Platform Opposes Teaching Critical Thinking Skills
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."
"We recommend that local school boards and classroom teachers be given more authority to deal with disciplinary problems. Corporal punishment is effective and legal in Texas. "
Good question. ....... From the 19th century it has been used to designate a world or atmosphere where intellectuals engage in pursuits that are disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. As such, it usually carries pejorative connotations of a wilful disconnect from the everyday world; esoteric, over-specialized, or even useless research" - wikipedia
"In Judeo/Christian tradition, the term Ivory Tower is a symbol for noble purity. It originates with the Song of Solomon (7,4) ("Your neck is like an ivory tower")
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Sadly, what you just said has nothing to do with the actual platform document. They say quite explicitly that they oppose the teaching of "critical thinking skills". That's not the name of some taxpayer funded propaganda campaign, nor is it some modern "left-wing pseudo-intellectual" idea. That's a standard, widely used term that has been around for many many decades, and simply refers to the idea that you shouldn't accept whatever someone tells you without considering it carefully. The fact that they consider it "a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education" shows just how wacky they are. There is nothing novel or experimental about it. Teaching children to think critically and question beliefs is exactly what good teachers have been doing for centuries, and has long been considered to be one of the essential goals of education.
And that is exactly what they don't want people doing, as they state very clearly. They say these curricula "have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs", and they consider that a very bad thing. They want students to believe whatever they're told to believe, and never question it. In short, they support "a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response" to whatever the authority figures in their lives tell them, and how you can possibly twist that around in your mind and claim the complete opposite is a mystery to me.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
The
Alarmingly, they openly state that they oppose schools teaching critical thinking, on the grounds that it may challenge 'student's fixed beliefs'
The PDF you quoted (ellipses and emphasis mine) :
We oppose the teaching of...programs...which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs
The Texas GOP does not oppose "critical thinking skills" that may challenge religious beliefs, they oppose things named "critical thinking skills" but are really just a packaged curriculum designed specifically to challenge religious beliefs. Basically all they're saying in this quote is they don't want schools teaching that there is no Jesus. They do not oppose critical thinking skills, just things called critical thinking skills so their opponents can create headlines just such as this.
This article is an alarmist red herring. Spun back around, it would be like the Texas GOP creating a program called "Fluffy Cuddly Bunnies" that uses Outcome Based Education, and tests students to make sure they've achieved the outcome of professing their faith in Jesus. Then you came along and say, "I oppose this program" they can write articles with the summary "Myrdos2 wants to impose atheism on all students, hates fluffy cuddly bunnies and is so ignorant that he opposes rigorous testing to make sure our kids are learning!"
Disclaimer: I am an agnostic atheist and not a Republican. But I don't like misleading articles that use linguistic games to make people look like they said things they didn't.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
If one were to actually read the platform, one would note that the Texas Republicans -- and this is a direct quote -- "oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs".
They claim -- as justification -- that all those things are "simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning)", which is factually incorrect (OBE is essentially an approach to the management of education, while critical thinking skills are a skill area; the two are completely orthogonal) but independently of their justification, they do, in fact, state that they oppose teaching critical thinking skills.
And, looking beyond that, their further reason for opposing teaching all those supposed relabellings of OBE -- the potential to threaten students "fixed beliefs" -- is something that does not make sense for OBE at all (since OBE is content-neutral), but directly relevant to critical thinking skills (actual critical thinking skills, not any that would be a relabelling of OBE.)
Funny that, you didn't highlight the other part of it which is just as much relevant if not more.
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.
OBE isn't a teaching technique, its a system for evaluating educational systems and students within them (obviously, how you assess effectiveness will, in an ideal world, inform what approaches you take down the line, but OBE is not in itself a teaching technique.)
Critical thinking skills also aren't a teaching technique, they are a subject matter that is taught. They can be taught within a system that uses traditional input-based methods of system evaluation and traditional relative-performance based evaluations students, or within a system that uses objective outcomes-based measures for both systems and students, and by any of a variety of teaching techniques independently of the system of evaluation.
The only relation between the two is that OBE is an application of critical thinking skills to education, rather than equivalent to teaching critical thinking skills.
(OBE, incidentally, isn't particularly a liberal thing; its more of a "run education like an efficient business" thing. Ideologues on the left and right both often oppose it, because it threatens to reveal that practices driven by ideology that are sold as effective actually, objectively, are ineffective.)
I just said that terms like "Higher order thinking skills" are a bunch of linguistic BULLSHIT attached to what is effectively a policy of teaching children to have a pavlovian "yessum massa!" response to politically correct buzzwords.
If you had bothered to consult any of the literature pertaining to the concepts you are so quick to condemn, you'd know that your entire take on higher-order thinking skills is incorrect.
To elaborate, in the past, psychologists and educational specialists have found it meaningful to partition thought into two groups, referred to as higher and lower, both of which have been rather well characterized. For instance, N. R. F. Maier ("An aspect of human reasoning", British Journal of Psychology, vol. 24, pp. 144-155, 1933; "Reasoning in rats and human beings", The Psychological Review, vol. 44, pp. 365-378, 1937), who used the terms learned behavior and reproductive learning in lieu of lower-order thinking, found that learned behavior came from contiguous experiences with previous repetitions of the relationships involved in the learned behavior pattern, e.g., memorization of multiplication tables via repeated practice. In contrast, behavior integrations that are made up of two or more isolated experiences are qualitatively different, as they arise without previous repetition, and hence constitute "reasoning" or higher-order thinking. To phrase this in a slightly different manner, "reasoning", is used to solve problems that arise when behavior is blocked because a desired end is not immediately attainable. A good example of "reasoning", that is in line with this description, is when a student that knows how to compute the area of simple geometric shapes, e.g., triangles and squares, and can see how to apply that knowledge, without guidance, to solve for the area of general polygons; in that scenario, the student has happened upon a combination of events that may have never been previously associated.
As a second instance, F. M. Newman ("Higher order thinking in teaching social studies: A rationale for the assessment of classroom thoughtfulness", Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol. 22, 41-56, 1990) defined higher- and lower-order thinking, in virtually the same manner as Maier, based upon observations in classrooms and interviews with teachers and department chairs. That is, lower-order thinking demands only routine or mechanical application of previously acquired information, e.g., inserting numbers into established formulas or regurgitating lists of facts. On the other hand, higher-order thinking "challenges the student to interpret, analyze, or manipulate information". Furthermore, he pointed out that since individuals differ in the kinds of problems they find challenging, higher-order thinking is relative: what one person finds challenging another may find elementary; as such, to determine the extent to which the individual is involved in higher-order thinking, one would presumably need to know something about that individual's background.
Beyond the above two examples, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in education and psychology journals that touch on higher-order thinking and critical thinking (which are sometimes used interchangeably). In all of the ones that I have skimmed over, the overwhelming consensus is that higher-order thinking skills are critical, logical, reflective, metacognitive, or creative processes activated when one encounters unfamiliar problems, uncertainties, questions or dilemmas, and certainly are not, as you erroneously stated, "linguistic bullshit" designed to indoctrinate students.
Oh, and before you fly off the handle and claim that I'm some brainwashed, leftist moron, let me state that all of the higher-order thinking skills I learned when I was in primary school and at university prepared me rather well for publishing papers in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Journal of the American Statistical Society, Biometrics, Biometrika, and Annals of Statistics, i.e., the top statistics journals.
I've never understood why divorce gets so much less attention than gay marriage from these people. It's an order of magnitude more "threatening" to marriage, yet the platform gives divorce all of 2 lines. The gay bits total 26 lines--actually more than that if you include things like an oblique Boy Scouts reference.
Anyway, you some of the best parts (emphasis mine):
Immunizations All adult citizens should have the legal right to conscientiously choose which vaccines are administered to themselves or their minor children without penalty for refusing a vaccine. We oppose any effort by any authority to mandate such vaccines or any medical database that would contain personal records of citizens without their consent.
Sex Education – We recognize parental responsibility and authority regarding sex education. We believe that parents must be given an opportunity to review the material prior to giving their consent. We oppose any sex education other than abstinence until marriage.
Controversial Theories – We support objective teaching and equal treatment of all sides of scientific theories. We believe theories such as life origins and environmental change should be taught as challengeable scientific theories subject to change as new data is produced. Teachers and students should be able to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of these theories openly and without fear of retribution or discrimination of any kind.
Juvenile Daytime Curfew - We strongly oppose Juvenile Daytime Curfews. Additionally, we oppose any official entity from detaining, questioning and/or disciplining our children without the consent of a child’s parent.
Traditional Principles in Education – We support school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded and which form the basis of America’s legal, political and economic systems. We support curricula that are heavily weighted on original founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and Founders’ writings.
Judeo-Christian Nation – As America is a nation under God founded on Judeo-Christian principles, we affirm the constitutional right of all individuals to worship in the religion of their choice. [ed: note the non sequitur]
Traditional Military Culture – To protect our serviceman and women and ensure that America's Armed Forces remain the best in the world, we affirm the timelessness of those values, the benefits of traditional military culture and the incompatibility of homosexuality with military service.
To be fair it's not universally awful; some of their positions are somewhat reasonable:
Internet Access - We support a free and open internet -- free from intrusion, censorship, or control by government or private entities. Due to the inherent benefit of anonymity, the anonymity of users is not to be compromised for any reason, unless consented by the user; or by court order. We also oppose any mandates by the government to collect and retain records of our internet activity.
Still, there's sure a lot of crazy in there.