Is Texas discouraging critical thinking in classrooms? | Opinion
Schools should encourage critical thinking in their students. Texas needs more independent thinkers, our columnist argues.It may seem that the furor over teaching controversial material has died down but, as the.
We will put a stop to this nonsense in the upcoming legislative session. Schools must get back to fundamentals and stop pushing ‘woke’ agendas.” Abbott was directly referring to class discussions of gender identity, but I know that public school teachers are still acutely aware that they are at risk in their classrooms if they broach any controversy having to do with an America that does not always realize its ideals. One of the ideals we insist teachers and students practice is the inculcation of critical thinking. But does the state really want any such thought? Critical thinking involves asking hard questions: How and why do things happen, how and why do people say the things they say, and how and why should people speak in order to change the things that need changing? Those who do not ask such questions before participating in civic discourse, before offering a lesson in a public school or before writing new laws about education, are blind to the larger contexts that shape history, that shape opinions; moreover, they want to pass such blindness on to the next generation, and the next, and so on. All people concerned about what is taught in public schools should think carefully about how new ideas should be presented to students. But do we really want to require teachers to eschew thoughtfulness in order to capitulate to vague, imperious rules? In rhetoric classes, we read and discuss issues that cause the greatest furor in the moment, that have a local connection, and that have sides clearly in opposition; in other words, we discuss issues like whether critical race theory should be banned in Texas.argue that it indoctrinates students, it is then necessary to study some of the best arguments about confronting controversial speech. We read John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on the subject. But shall I also teach “Undemocratic Democracy” by Jamelle Bouie — a provocative essay that challenges the idea that all people living in the U.S. have always been equally protected by foundational ideals regulating, among other things, who has been allowed to speak freely and who has not? These authors seem entirely relevant in shaping a discussion of the larger contexts in the debate about whether CRT is pernicious indoctrination. One context is described in Milton’s profoundly influential essay “Areopagitica”: Different parts of a building are brought by people who know their own parts well, but who may not understand at all the parts others bring. Yet the difference in parts may have essential value in the completion of a glorious edifice richer exactly because no one has a God’s-eye perspective on the whole construct. Milton was an early advocate of the idea — radical in 1646 — that censorship prevents inculcating critical thought. But wait: It now turns out that Bouie’s essay cannot be taught alongside Milton’s; Bouie’s work is part of the “1619 Project”; an essay on whether speech has been free to all in America is now banned in Texas. Has the state not banned teachers’ ability to establish contexts, to make issues relevant? Should teachers encourage students to participate in intellectual conversations that have great depth and subtlety? Or should we use vague terms like “woke” in order to excise that which challenges students to think about how and why their leaders use particular kinds of rhetorical choices? How will we help students to manage the depth and subtlety of history and literature if we are unable to ask students to look at as many different ideas as possible, and to ask how they are changed by, or need to formulate more and more elegant rebuttals to, these ideas?decide what to think, they will choose well, not motivated by hostility to information contrary to their beliefs, and not motivated by political expediency. Texas will need independent thinkers in the coming years, precisely because some state leaders so deeply distrust where that independence comes from. David Newman teaches English at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and lives in Odessa. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.
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