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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."
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".
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Interesting rant.
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.
"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. "
Propaganda? The summary comes straight from the policy guideline document.
an intolerant monoculture as the tenured elite in their ivory towers
Achievement unlocked: buzzword combo!
Has anyone ever actually seen a tower made of ivory? Where did that come from? The "tenured elite" at my small school with only 50,000 students worked in some pretty shitty offices. It would have been pretty sweet to go to class inside an ivory tower instead of the crappy linoleum-tiled brick cages we had the privilege of occupying. As long as they also had ivory elevators.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
That's just one more reason (as if more were needed) that government shouldn't be allowed in business, education, health care, money, etc., oh well, eventually the society will be so dumb, it wouldn't care about anything but their daily bowl of cheese grits or whatever they eat and a 12 hours of American Football on all channels daily. Eventually... oh wait.
You can't handle the truth.
LIBERALS! History's greatest monsters. Hitler was a liberal. Satan, too, is a liberal. As we all know since Hussein Obama was elected, Liberals (or "progressives" as they like to be called) sacrifice babies and drink their blood during the weekly satanic rituals they hold in the new, official, Sovereign Kenyan room of the white house. And that, folks, is why critical thinking skills need to be eliminated. Anything less, and you will let the Kenyan baby eating liberal progressives rule over you forever more. LIBERALS!
“Sometimes when faced with problems that are confusing and troubling it is easier to think what someone tells you to think, particularly something that touches a deep and dark nerve in your nature, rather than carry the burden and ambiguity of struggling with the facts and thinking for yourself. Repeating a party line is a shorthand way of avoiding real thought. And the predators are always there to take advantage of it. They welcome trouble and often foment crisis in order to advance their agendas.”
“Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had. It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit you were deceived, and to demand change and reform. But some people cannot do this, even when the facts of the deception are revealed. It seems as though the more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying the reality of the situation. And anyone who denies their perspective becomes 'the other,' someone to be feared and hated, shunned and eliminated, one way or the other.”
This was cited here http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article35340.html from another website...
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 :)
With republicans (and a number of conservatives).
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.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They clearly don't have much faith in their faith if they fear that something as simple as thinking would put it in danger.
Ryans Tutorials - A collection of technology tutorials.
Only to a neanderthal are "higher order thinking skills" considered "bullshit"
I guess the GOP is afraid of people able to critically think! They are afraid it would be detrimental to their mission! Heaven forefend should someone be able to use rational thinking to defeat idiocy.
No, it is not. It is NOT the GOP. It is the neo-cons and teapartiers within the GOP that correspond to Taliban.
The truth is, that many of the pre-reagan GOPers are disgusted by where their party is today.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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"
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.
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.
You get it all the time because your lack of actual logic and rational thinking makes it look like a troll.
I mean, you're argument almost always have come down to ad hom attacks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The truth is, many in the GOP say they are disgusted by the neocons but they don't do anything to discourage or oppose them. Talk is cheap.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
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.
If you actually look at the platform, the Texas Republicans' opposition is to the Outcome Based Education 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...
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.
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.
Ezekiel 23:20
No no no.
Don't you realize how dangerous it would be to have your fixed beliefs changed by:
a) A changing situation or
b) Your changing level of knowledge of the situation.
There is no telling where that could lead. It could lead to DANCING, for God's sake!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.
The truth is, many in the GOP say they are disgusted by the neocons but they don't do anything to discourage or oppose them. Talk is cheap.
The fracture in the Republican party is between those who support the views of the "American Taliban" and the traditional plutocrats who merely want to exploit them to get elected. Neither group has any motivation to tell them to fuck off.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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."
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Down with the dune sage brush lizard!
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Keep reading! You can find the PDF here via the Texas GOP Convention site. I had to track it down myself because it was so unbelievable; it seemed like Huff Po had fallen for a juvenile prank.
I just goes on
and on
and on
It covers everything from banning red light cameras, opposing mandatory animal identification, and opposing Federal highways through Texas to rubbing salt in wounds like the restoration of plaques honoring the Confederate Widow’s Pension Fund to the Texas Supreme Court building. No wonder these people are so upset. They're beset on all sides by people who want to speak Spanish or burn American flags or say that gay bashing is bad or let African Americans and Hispanic Americans vote. You know, people who don't want to say "under god" in the pledge of allegiance, or who think that religious monuments shouldn't be erected on Federal land. Maybe they should feel under assault, people who think like they do are dying off because they just don't make bigots like they used to.
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.)
Make them explain what they've done wrong and why it's wrong in writing. A 1-on-1 session too easily becomes a coddling session, especially if the kid is clever and emotionally manipulative. Forcing them to write essays critiquing their own behavior and only returning privileges when the essay is not only complete, but of sufficient quality, teaches critical thinking skills, morality, and grammar all at once.
It amazes me how many schools think that a fifteen minute detention is an effective form of discipline, how many parents who think that a time-out in the corner will teach their children right and wrong. Of course, this nonsensical form of discipline extends to adults, too; just look at the prison system.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
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?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.)
You may be interested to know about this paper, remarkable for its perception of the conservative mentality. Its a tad frightening. The author basically posits that conservative mindset is actually based in a psychology that drives society via politics, religion, etc.
C|N>K
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.
I have a son who is autistic. Nevertheless, he recently complete a community college certificate course in Culinary Prep for Disabled Students. One of the major portions of the classroom study was "critical thinking" and covered:
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.
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
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.
Are you referring to the same NSDAP platform of 1920 as declared by Adolf Hitler as I am? You know, the crazy one that burned, maimed and executed Jews, Gypsies, the handicapped, and non-whites? Because they are pretty much pure on conservative. I'll quote a few highlights here.
"Whoever has no citizenship is to be able to live in Germany only as a guest, and must be under the authority of legislation for foreigners."
"Any further immigration of non-citizens is to be prevented."
" We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death"
And my personal favorite (emphasis mine) "24. We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: common utility precedes individual utility."
Aside from some *very* basic progressive ideas (parks, some basic welfare), the Nazi party is fundamentally conservative, both in it's approaches to foreigners, it's heavy usage of Christianity, and the death penalty.
I think you're going to find FDR to be at odds with Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini at several places. Obviously, he agreed on minor points (public parks, welfare), but on most he did not. While Hitler was putting Nuremberg Decrees in place, FDR was setting up social security.
I've been a "greenie" for more than 3 decades. You do not have the faintest idea how or what I think, so please stop pretending you do.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
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
@de_machina
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.
The really fascinating issue in this submission to me is the part about schools doing things which challenge "'student's fixed beliefs' and undermine 'parental authority'"
Do we have to conceed that parents should have some control over the things their children are taught in public education?
Do we have to conceed that students should be allowed to have fixed beliefs which should go unchallenged by educators?
There is so much essence of civilization in these questions. On one hand you want to have some continuity in belief systems because they are an anchor for civilizations. If you completely throw them out and start over every generation it will be chaos. The Texas Republicans are advocating this continuity and its not totally unreasonable.
On the other hand, what happens when parents and students have belief systems that have gone totally rigid to the point of being dead or worst case gone, completely off the rails. Using education to maintain bad belief systems just because they are the prevailing belief system seems like a truly horrible idea.
I personally wrankle at the concept that this party platform seems to advocate locking children in to the belief system of their parents until they are 18. You ever wonder why kids tend to veer hard left when the hit college. Its because they are compensating for being locked in to the usually conservative belief systems of their aging parents, along with churches they were compelled to attend, and schools many of which are idealogically suffocating due to the often conservative tendencies of state and local school boards.
Seems to me there is a chance the idealogy being promoted in Texas might produce two divirgent sets of children.
A) Reactionary automatons who are going to go through life locked in to the ideaology they were indoctrinated in to as children and fear or hate everyone not adhering to it
B) Radicals who are going to reject everything the system attempted to indoctrinate in to them and probably try to blow up that system every chance they get.
The two group will eventually land on /. and proceed to troll the crap out of each other, like tonight.
@de_machina
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.
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.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Clearly, you're not a "leftist moron," but I would like to know why you hate America and want the terrorists to win.
All you liberal communists are always exactly the same by brutally purging all dissent marching in rabid lockstep to the beat of the Kenyan Stalinist Nazi Pretender's jackboots against the empty hollow shell of the Consintution with everyone shouting:
War is peas.
Freedum is slavery.
Ingorunts is strangth.
I"LL NEVER SUBMIT TO BEING FORCED TO MARRY ANOTHER MAN BECAUSE PRESIDENT HUSSEIN HAS YOUSERPED THE CONTISTUTION: GOD"S LAW!
How do respond to that, smart guy!?
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.
"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.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
This is why the late George Carlin was right, Language matters and we ALL must be on our guard to keep those that want to warp and twist us from using language to take away our ability to fight back with reason.
Its like how they changed "bible in the classroom" into intelligent design, shell shock into post traumatic stress disorder (which still sounds like PMS more than battlefield trauma to me) or how they took an easy to understand word like rapist and replaced it with sex offender which frankly can mean just about any damned thing just depending on the state you are in.
That is why you are right and we have to point out these "weasel words" as i call them, because they are nothing more than attempts to twist language to make an issue harder to understand or harder to argue against.
And let me finish by saying thank whatever deity you believe in for home schooling, because I have met some of the kids my oldest would have graduated with if he and his brother wouldn't have been taken out of school by us and....damn, these kids are lucky if they can count their damned change while my oldest is on the dean's list and kicking ass through pre-med.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You misunderstand. The GOP head is currently neo-con controlled. There is a 3-way battle going on within the party. Basically, you have the reagan/W neo-cons who are only interested in their party (hate to use it, but 1930's Germany should sound familiar). They constantly use patriotism to appeal to Americans to follow them. Likewise, they will SAY the right thing, such as promising to balance the budget.. Yet, if you look, reagan inherited a minor deficit/debt and then ran it up massively. W inherited a balanced budget and then destroyed it (and our economy). Under both, they built up the military and sent trillions to their friends. For example, re-doing battleships was worthless. B1 was a disaster. Likewise, DARPA is a useful defense R&D. Basically, it does loads of advanced R&D. Under W, the money was shifted from Cheap University R&D, into expensive Businesses. It is extremely wasteful. At any rate, the neo-cons are about power and making sure that they remain in power.
The religious right wingers here have a goal of making us into a theocracy. Like the neo-cons, they wrap themselves in the flag, but also the cross. They scream that they are opposed to abortions, but then work hard to deny access to Birth Control. Likewise, if a single girl has a child, then the mother AND the child are punished. These ppl are idealists simply to AQ. You do what they want, or some of them WILL kill you. Pat Roberts comes to mind. Likewise groups like Focus on the Family. Oddly, these kinds of ppl love to scream that God is punishing Gays, etc. and therefore caused Katrina. So, now with Focus on the Family area being massively burned, I am waiting patiently to hear what Robert and FotF will now claim? Perhaps that God hates liars?
Now, we have the tea party. It is NOT what it looks like. Many will claim that it is Libertarian (which is what I am still registered as, but increasingly, I am 'l' and not as much 'L'), but it really is not. The teaparty has multiple leaders. It was created by the Koch brothers and Rove (yes, the great evil one has his hands all over this one). The problem is, that many of the younger congress is supported and related to it. For example, Cantor is a major tea* member. When Obama and Boehner were close to a deficit deal, cantor came in and killed it. Why? Because it allowed tax cuts to expire, which Cantor is sworn to prevent (google for grover norquist).
Now, have you noticed the older GOPers leaving office and saying that they can not solve things? That is NOT about the dems. They have and could easily work with dems. They were typically about working on AMERICA's needs. Their problem is that their party REFUSES to work with dems, libertarians, etc. All 3 of these groups have sworn that they will NOT COMPROMISE. Gov. is all about compromise. Without it, well, we have a situation in America.
Goldwater had many things to say about groups like this
But probably the best one, would be:
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
At this time, the GOP is a party of some of the worse of America, that is hard at work trying to do the same to America.
Sadly, the dems are loaded with idiots at the top.
We desperately need a 3rd party that is composed of social moderates to liberals, but with STRONG fiscal conservative and a strong sense of who are nation is.
IOW, your assessment of the GOP is pretty much accurate.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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 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.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
I assume that when they say "challenging the student's fixed beliefs", they also mean something else entirely instead of insinuating that challenging beliefs is somehow fundamentally wrong?
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
The penny dropped for me while reading your post and I suddenly understood what CajunArson was trying to say - and he makes a fair point that the summary makes it look like Texas Republicans are objecting to children being taught to think when really, in his opinion, they're opposing the indoctrination of children. Now, had CajunArson said he was "in favour of teaching children to think, BUT that's not what was being proposed, this was..." then he would have established himself as pro-thinking, instead of anti-HOTS. And for someone for whom the use of language is important, he might try to make his point more clearly without resorting to bullying attacks on people who disagree with him - the use of words which I'm sure he is perfectly able to justify to himself. Which is ironic.
You gotta love how he advocates outright destruction of half of the political spectrum in his sig and accuses the other side of advocating murder. It's bigots, hatemongers and idiots all the way down with these guys.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.