(Update: Stephen Colbert’s take; other details)
In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:
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.
Yes, you read that right. The party opposes the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” because it believes the purpose is to challenge a student’s “fixed beliefs” and undermine “parental authority.”
It opposes, among other things, early childhood education, sex education, and multicultural education, but supports “school subjects with emphasis on the Judeo-Christian principles upon which America was founded.”
When taken with the other parts of the education platform(see below), it seems a fair conclusion that the GOP Party in Texas doesn’t think much of public education. Unfortunately, this notion isn’t limited to the GOP in Texas but is more commonly being seen across the country by some of the most strident of “school reformers.”
It should be noted that after the plank in the platform was ridiculed, Texas GOP Communications Director Chris Elam told TPM.com that it was all a big mistake and that opposition to “critical thinking” wasn’t supposed to be included. It can’t be easily removed, he said, because the platform had been approved by a party convention and any changes would also have to go through the same process. That clears things up.
You can see Stephen Colbert’s hilarious take on this episode byclicking here.
It also seems worth noting that there is some question as to whether critical thinking can actually be taught. University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham argues that it cannot be taught in this 2007 article.
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/summer2007/Crit_Thinking.pdf"What do all these studies boil down to? First, critical thinking (as well as scientific thinking and other domain-based thinking) is not a skill. There is not a
set of critical thinking skills that can be acquired and deployed regardless of context. Second, there are metacognitive strategies that, once learned, make critical thinking more likely. Third, the ability to think critically (to actually do what the metacognitive strategies call for) depends on domain knowledge and practice. For teachers, the situation is not hopeless, but no one should underestimate the difficulty of teaching students to think critically."
No comments:
Post a Comment