That’s a good and accurate list. Back when I taught Middle School math in the 80’s everyone knew that the large educational text publishers wrote separate texts for Texas. It benefited their bottom line since Texas is such a large consumer. I doubt it’s any different today.
From your list, the big concerns for me are the help for the poor, and RURAL education (big problem politically).
Since Political parties are not mentioned in the Constitution, are they Unconstitutional?
I interpret the Constitution to say that the People elect Representatives and they represent the People in the making of law. If they represent an ideology and a political party are they capable of representing the People as well?
I am quite certain that ideology is the bane of any society. I don’t mean just Fascism or Communism, but all ideologies do the same thing: they close minds to the alternatives. A pluralistic society is one that not only welcomes all points of view, it thrives off them.
The welcoming beacon of Democracy that America was supposed to be has become a closed mind, with no ability to solve its very real problems because ideology has frozen out imagination.
EINSTEIN warned of this. So have Immanuel Kant, Gaston Bachelard, Aristotle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
America is dead in the water without imagination.
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Well said!
Welcome to CFI.
The reason I object to what is said about education is that education has become something that is measured by scores on memory testing. All of our progress as human civilization is actually from imagination, not memory. We are where we are because some minds ignored the past (and what was memorized) in order to find some new explanation of (any subject). How do you educate for imagination? You present topics and all sides of the argument, not as truth but as potential solutions. Then you ask the class to sleep on it. Dreams are imagination and re-learning how to access that part of our minds is the way to access imagination: not fantasy but solutions.
I think that would be a hard case to make. But any well-organized group can subvert the powers in the Constitution. As George Washington said in his farewell address,
" However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion. "
I tend to point to “money in politics” as the problem. That is directly connected to political parties given how the money flows. I don’t know all the campaign finance laws, but it was a strange twist last year when Kamala Harris legally inherited the fund of the Biden/Harris campaign, making her the de facto candidate.
So many laws have been made to protect the rich and powerful that anything resembling George’s ideas of democracy are now at risk. People can still organize though.
We discuss the topic of critical thinking here often, usually in relation to bad thinking, like a conspiracy theory or misinformation in politics. There is also the “lead a horse to water” or “chicken and egg” problem. That is, how do you get someone to want to think critically or accept that they might not be thinking critically, and what led them to be poor thinkers?
Money certainly leads to fixed ideas by cutting off those without money who may be imaginative. It is a tool for disenfranchising/ignoring imagination. Just as in science, imagination is the source of all solutions. What we need is more voices and technology is the way to do it. In Science and technology, we collaborate in a unique way. We publish papers and allow (encourage) others to read them. The result is a building on each other’s foundations and discovery of many new things at a rate that exceeds anything we could do by ourselves. Only Einstein had the ability to see that all the understanding of Physics was wrong and was able to propose something NEW in explanation of the physical world. Most science and Technology is only this process of building on each other.
Critical thinking must be taught. Teaching children to memorize and measuring their progress as memorizers is not just contrary to critical thinking, it destroys it.
Agreed. So, the chicken and egg problem, or maybe call it a bootstrap issue, is that people who aren’t thinking critically need to get on board for teaching critical thinking. It happens. There are good teachers out there and good curriculums but there are also home schoolers and advocates for creationism as science.
Decades long degradation of the US public school system, banning books, purging libraries, the firing of educators eg anti capitalist , pro Palestinian, censoring curricula of any ideas that express rebellion or even critical thought . There must be a reason why this has been allowed to occur.
Teaching children to memorize and measuring their progress as memorizers is not just contrary to critical thinking, it destroys it. I believe critical thinking is more of a skill than one of the many thousands of teaching methods that have been used by our education system experimenting on our children.
I don’t think it’s memorization that impedes children’s ability to the pathway of critical thinking.
Isn’t comparison of ideas part of critical thinking? If so memorization is a major part of the critical thinking process.
Children start education with memory. Communication being the first step. History shows people have always wanted education. Education going back to prehistory was based upon memory. Yesterday was Wensday. Yet it is taught Wednesday. How can you have critical thinking without having a proper education system? Sure, you’re going to have a few Einsteins and Musk, but the public will miss out. Not only miss out but they will fight the system of change. What would happen if tomorrow everybody started spelling Wednesday phonically?
According to AI - In summary, while a sudden shift to phonetic spelling of “Wednesday” would be disruptive initially due to variations in pronunciation, it would likely lead to a new standard emerging over time, making it easier for people to spell this frequently misspelled word.
Making life easier. I’m all for that. Keep it simple and move forward. Point being a simple system will be used more often.
The first step would be to get rid of illiteracy in America. And I totally agree we need to get rid of a memorization system in our communication system. Our system is no better than our morals. Teaching morals requires memorization. We don’t need to get rid of memorization we need to use it correctly.
I fully agree.
Matter is what we memorize and how. The way children are taught is a disaster.
Memory needs to be trained. And one of the best way to train memory is to learn, and to check you know.
In any job, one memorize thousands of facts, of rules of ways to do things.
Critical thinking rests in part on the ability to refer to facts and ideas you know because you have been taught.
One of the big issue in the present crisis is that people have no memory of past events, no knowledge of history, no knowledge about the great thinkers of the past.
If critical thinking is just comparing what you know to what you know, yes, you are right. But critical thinking is also, and more importantly, comparing what you know to some new idea that challenges what you know.
You and society doesn’t come to accept new ideas without this second form of critical thinking and that depends entirely on imagination.
AI will eventually have the bugs worked out, When that happens, machines will do all those memory jobs better than any human. They do most of them better now.
My point is looking beyond now into the future. What should children be taught now in order to be productive and well-adjusted when those jobs no longer exist.
They are born with imagination, but we currently teach them to ignore imagination and use their memories. What I suggest is that we also teach them how to access their imagination in order to solve society’s problems. Unfortunately, I think the first step is to force out the agents of ideology, political parties.
Not sure what you’re basing that on. Besides, critical thinking is about evaluating data to reach a conclusion while considering alternate viewpoints, it’s looking at the opinions of multiple experts that don’t fully agree and deciding for ourselves. Some imagination required but that’s not the only aspect.
Information: Experts say vaccine cause autism
Knowledge: Autism predate vaccines = warning ==> Which experts ? Which context ?
Lack of knowledge : there is a doubt, i look on Internet: most people say that vaccine cause Autism
It can have effects both sense.
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Where did the alternative viewpoints come from? Pretending that imagination plays no role leaves us with no progress.
This is why I am against all ideology. There is no room in ideology for imagination. You are stuck with the beliefs of your forefathers.
Teaching children that imagination is the key to progress should be the point of education.
No need to be defensive. I didn’t say imagination plays no role, I said it’s different from critical thinking.
Multiple studies and expert opinions. Our best evidence doesn’t always lead to a consensus and new evidence can challenge the consensus.
There is a lot of studying going on about how we form our ideologies. There aren’t easy answers.
Didn’t mean to sound harsh. For me, imagination is the only important thing in the human personality, society and the government we choose.
We wouldn’t do studies and search out expert opinions unless we thought our current understanding was inadequate in some way. And all the alternatives would be imaginative because they would begin with rejection of the current wisdom.
Critical thinking without imagination is comparing apples to apples. In a world of apples, you can’t understand an orange unless you first say that it isn’t an apple.
What about dysfunctional progress?
In a world where everyone worships “progress” that gets translated into profits über Alles - what have we really achieved when it comes to humanity or our planet and the biosphere that made it all possible?
What about honest curiosity and desire to learn?