Growing up, I used to think everyone was a “critical thinker”, capable of relying upon our learning instincts in order to question, challenge or even properly evaluate worldly assumptions or biases, then dispensing logical and well-reasoned conclusions following such analysis.
Today, however, we have a convoy of extremist and “evangelical” lobotomists attempting to eradicate any thought process that does not support its authoritarian agenda, mostly by enlisting social network “influencers” whose cultural values are defined by egotism and narcissistic self-admiration that totally embrace their “me-ism” beliefs.
For such proselytizers the very first sin was not Eve eating the apple offered by the serpent, but rather those who felt the need to feel compassion. Wasn’t it Charlie Kirk, the recently assassinated Trump supporter, who said, “I can’t stand the word empathy. I think it’s a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage”?
Not convinced? Then how do you explain how the words, “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) have now become the pillars of compassion that must be torn down before our American cousins can again become “great”? Where is the evil of having the web pages of the Department of Defense purged of the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-black regiment committed to the support of all allies resisting Hitler’s fascistic road to world dominance? Then there’s this guy Doug Abbott, the Governor of Texas, a man who embodies anti-DEI philosophy and practice; he’s a paraplegic whose very mobility requires a wheelchair that symbolically flaunts his need for inclusion; does this then mean that he’s faking his belief structure, or just embracing an ideology that could care less what message it sends, so long as their ultimate goal of exercising power is upheld?
Unfortunately, progressives have considerable difficulty in tying down the authoritarian political structure with its own contradictory philosophical ropes, instead advancing a political premise based upon what is thought to be character emancipating, only to become buried in a groundswell of political overreaction.
For instance, the term “woke” was first introduced by African American students to describe individuals who could acknowledge and discuss society’s systemic inequalities (as did Canadian Indigenous students examining the colonialist influence on their nations’ affairs). However, when discussion became too focused upon the role “white” empires played in creating these inequalities, the racially charged nature of these trigger points would become the lesson the authoritarian right would utilize to destroy the discussion’s value as a true lesson history should learn.
A similar overemphasis upon gender defining, sexual orientation and the equality of all in the distribution of rights has not only led to an ever-increasing expansion of the alphabet soup label describing such beliefs but has also increased its backlash by using such factors to link them to genetic mutation, in turn entertaining the notion from the right that such “perversion” is “curable” by genetic sequence reconstruction, a procedure that is still decades away in perfecting, and might even result in other “forms” of such diversity being discovered. Equally embedded in this confrontation is the faith in which those identifying gender and sexual differentiation place upon the psychological “cure” of those insecure in their sexual identity to begin describing themselves through non-personal pronoun offerings to deal with their own feelings of distress or inadequacy – an approach that seriously deemphasizing the role that bullying creates upon those feelings in school, or how studies emphasizing how such individuals change for the better when they’re introduced by a first name that makes them feel more comfortable in their new sexual identity.
By now, however, someone, somewhere, HAS to be asking the question as to how such factors detract from the incapacity of our government to construct an education measurement of academic standards, so that we might better be able to measure our intellectual progress relative to other nations on Earth, and in the process help us improve our capacity to teach so as to make such goals even more obtainable. My answer is simple: because governments have increasingly taken the approach that they must ridicule the discussion of current academic research and the ideas such research is creating, we have no choice but to attempt to improve our ways of teaching by again promoting the ideals of constructive yet critical thinking.
In actuality, such tools already exist that we could better use to measure our academic success levels and standards. Most of these devices originate in the laying out of Piaget’s cognitive skill development process, and pursuing the development of such skills by creating evaluative processes linked to the four stages – sensimotor (innate skills), preopertional (basic skills), concrete operational (application of basic skills) and formal operational (intuitive processes, including the abstract and logical thinking).
The problem with this model, however, is that it imposes occasionally unrealistic age expectations upon intellectual development, ignores the differentiation in learning age levels between males and females, and is too often considered, even by mathematicians, to be a linear process resulting in continuous learning, as opposed to producing exponential results in the delivery of true learning.
So – “guess” what next week’s column is going to attempt to clarify…
