"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants" - Albert Camus

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Death of Critical Thinking

As you might have gleaned from my previous posts, I am dismayed about the current state of our education.  Not a week passes that I do not witness another unmistakable sign of death of reason and critical thinking in our public schools as well as on our campuses of higher learning.  This is symptomatic of cultural Marxism that has been plaguing our educational system from primary school on up for the past five or so decades

Ever since in the 1920s and 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, the father of cultural Marxism who argued that traditional values must be obliterated in order to free “oppressed” social groups, called for eliminating social decorum and glorifying perverse behavior in order to destroy the Western middle class and collapse society from within (guess where Cloward and Piven got their strategy from), the radical teacher unions in the U.S. have adopted his blueprint to undermine free market capitalism as the enemy of  a "socially just" political and economic system.

As such, schools have given up on developing critical thinking skills that usually take place during the second stage of one's education - the logic (or dialectic) stage.  The reason is as obvious as day: teach a child to think critically and you will lose a future progressive.  Here is the latest example of inadequately educated children (I shudder to think that they will be running this country soon)



The same group of students have similar videos taken on different campuses of UC, including Berkeley, that reinforce my fears that my children may become such zombies if I do not intervene.  A fair warning to all parents: take active interest in your young children's education.

6 comments:

Tel said...

Patriot, you have done an excellent job of describing the problem, which is great as a first step. Where to go from here? What is the solution?

I earnestly believe that everyone deserves at least the chance of an education. If they don't want to study, or they don't take an interest in their schoolwork then that's their responsibility. However, I'm upset by kids excluded merely because their parents are poor.

Let's suppose I'm sitting on an aircraft next to another passenger, I would be happy to pay for an education for that passenger so they can make a life for themselves (and have something worth living for), instead of letting them fall into the clutches of the type of brain washing religion that would tell them that blowing up aircraft is God's will.

If I'm standing next to another voter in line for the ballot then I want them to have a bit of critical thinking, and put a skeptical eye over the promises that the politicians are offering.

Trouble is, when I pay my tax money to government... what they deliver is first and foremost what suits themselves, not what I want. But here I am describing the problem again.

I would value your opinion on the following idea, can it work?

http://jamesdelingpole.com/blog/free-schools-the-stake-in-the-heart-of-the-progressive-vampire-1402/

The Patriot said...

The possible solutions in the U.S. as I see it to take on the long battle to undo the damage done by cultural Marxists and/or lobby for school vouchers.

First entails consciencious, liberty loving parents to get involved with their PTAs and School Boards. Once enough activist parents get involved, local school systems can be changed, however insignificant that may seem. Once a critical mass has been reached, probably in a decade or more, enough awareness can be generated to weaken teacher unions. This option would be a long fought battle since we cannot expect to undo the damage of the last half a century overnight. These Marxists are well entranched in the school system and it will not be an easy task to uproot them.

The second and more practical solution would be to lobby government to institute school vouchers. Being able to send your child to a private or a parochial school will create competition for public schools. Over time, as more and more parents see the relative success of non government schools, the system will have to change for the better (as it relates to providing a classical liberal arts education at the primary and secondary levels) or perish. This would be very effective; that is why teacher unions and progressive politicians are the main roadblock for its implementation. In few inner cities where it has been experimented with, it has been very successful (that is why Obama Dept. of Ed. killed it in D.C.)

We already pay plenty for education. Here in the metro D.C. area, typical jurisdiction spends upwards of $15,000 per pupil in elem. and secondary schools. That is huge compared to what is spent in Europe (or anywhere else)
Most of the money comes locally from real estate taxes with the rest coming from the state and federal funds.

If I wish not to impose on that system, why shouldn't I be able to get what I paid in taxes back in form of a voucher that I can use at a non government school?

The only reason is because all these Marxists know that vouchers would mean their defeat.
As I said, if children learn to think for themselves, they become productive citizens who will most likely shun collectivism -- meaning the end of all leftist dreams.

Anonymous said...

Maybe you should understand what critical thinking really is before you announce it's death.

"...critical thinking reflects the common perception that human thinking left to itself often gravitates toward prejudice, over-generalization, common fallacies, self-deception, rigidity, and narrowness."

http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/ourConceptCT.cfm

The Patriot said...

Look you moron (Anonymous), stop your pathetic attempts to mis-define what critical thinking means in classical education. Your writing style gives away the fact that you have not even heard of classical education and your piss poor U.S. education leaves you naked in trying to argue something way beyond your intellectual level.

Here for your education (from the same site you used):

Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

From Wikipedia:

Critical thinking, in general, refers to higher-order thinking that questions assumptions.

From criticalthinking.com:

Critical thinking is the identification and evaluation of evidence to guide decision making. A critical thinker uses broad in-depth analysis of evidence to make decisions and communicate his/her beliefs clearly and accurately.

From dictionary.com:

the mental process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information to reach an answer or conclusion.

Are you starting to get the meaning, moron?
You are one of the 55% who graduate from college without even high school level skills as studies say. Go read a comic book or something!

Anonymous said...

Excellent. Now please read the definitions you posted and take them to heart, because your blog is the antithesis of critical thinking. Good luck.

Tel said...

http://www.criticalthinking.org/page.cfm?PageID=474&CategoryID=73


A battle for economic vitality is being fought. Yet consider how unprepared we have been, and continue to be, for that battle. Consider the size of our national debt, the decay of our infrastructure. Consider the intensification of social divisions and divisiveness, the obsolescence of our systems of public education. Consider our traditional but increasingly dangerous assumption that the solutions to our problems lie in a dependence on traditional wisdom. Consider our traditional anti-intellectualism, our traditional parochialism. Can we free ourselves from our own narrow modes of thinking?


I would agree with most of that, but I would also hasten to add that for the most part, the USA has abandoned its constitution. Traditional wisdom should not be thrown away lightly, nor should it be followed blindly for that matter.