 |
| Marie Snyder, in a "no nonsense" pose. (Photo supplied by her. Image manipulated by Bill Hulet.) |
I'd wanted to get a primary source for the Texas Republican party resolution opposing critical thinking skills, but it seems to have been scrubbed from the Wayback Machine. So I'll have to settle with a secondary source. Here's the exact language (the last paragraph directly deals with critical thinking---but the three earlier ones might be of interest too):
I'm not about to say that the sky is falling because some politicians in Texas voted for a dumb resolution during a policy convention. But I think it is important to understand that right from the very beginning of critical thinking various parts of the community have fought to suppress it. Indeed, the most famous of early critical thinkers---Socrates---was executed because he was supposedly corrupting the youth of Athens.
&&&&
Talking about corrupting the youth----.
Snyder makes the point that the most push back she gets is from students who complain that her reading assignments are just too darn hard. I don't think that in my time high school students were much better at working through difficult concepts. If there is any evidence of this, it is probably only because there was such brutal "sifting out" of the student body. This involved "the great cull" in grade nine when the students who were deemed "not high school material" were shunted off to special places where they learned to be barbers, hair stylists, brick layers, etc. The majority of the rest were put into the four year program with only a small minority entering the five year stream with the expectation they would head off to university. My limited understanding is that nothing like this sort of process currently happens at public schools.
But having said that, there certainly are a lot of philosophers who demand a little more attention than the average teen is used to. Consider the following quotes I found from Immanuel Kant, who was someone I found very hard to understand when I was at university. If memory serves, his academic prose is turgid and boring as Hell. But having said that, his ideas are really worth thinking about.
I do think, however, that we should be very concerned about whether or not we are creating a generation of people who have the attention span of a gnat.
I'm a little concerned about this because my read of history says that in the past people seemed to have had a lot more toleration for what we would call "boring stuff" today. Take, for example, the difference between the front cover of the Globe and Mail newspaper in the early 20th versus 21st centuries.
Comparing these two front covers, it seems obvious to me that publishers and editors at The Globe and Mail definitely think that readers are a less willing to read dense stories and are instead much more addicted to "eye candy".
People seemed a lot more willing to listen to long political speeches in times past too. Consider the Lincoln/Douglas debates that were held in 1858. These were between the Republican and Democratic candidates to be the Illinois representative to the US Senate. The format consisted of one candidate opening up with an hour-long speech, followed by the other having an hour and a half speech, followed by a half hour response by the original speaker. There were seven different debates, with one candidate starting first half the time and the other the other half.
Compare this with the first Trump/Biden debate, where the format supposedly consisted of six, fifteen minute segments. They were each supposed to answer questions put to them by the moderator and only had two minutes for response followed by thirteen minutes of "back and forth".
&&&&
My gut instinct about this change is that this has come about for a variety of reasons. First of all, the velocity of human life has increased dramatically. Secondly, we all have a lot more things fighting for our limited attention. Also, technology has dramatically increased our ability to add audio and visual elements to what used to be a pretty-much print-driven communications system.
 | |
| McLuhan, Wiki Media |
Twitter restricts the length of a post to one or two sentences and doesn't lend itself to back-and-forth conversations. That means that it has an inherent bias towards cliche, provocation, and, prejudice. Donald Trump loved it.
Similarly, Instagram has a bias towards images. That's why if you look at the top "influencers" on that medium, they tend to not much more than celebrities posing like models. And like famous people posing to sell perfume, clothes, watches, etc, they charge fees for "product placement".
The prognosis isn't entirely negative. The explosive growth in podcasts seems to have created a whole new industry that involves creating "deep dive" stories about abstruse subjects---Pushkin Industries comes to my mind. And the same thing can be said about You Tube channels---probably the Green Brothers' Crash Course series are the best example of this. There has also been an explosive growth in "long-form" news blogs, most notably the Vox media empire.
The problem is, however, not that individuals cannot find good stuff on line---it's that there is also lots of bad stuff too, and it's really popular. And, as this pandemic has pointed out, there are lots of situations where it isn't enough to just let the smart people do the right thing, the dumb ones have to do it too! And if you are teaching critical thinking to a room full of kids who spend a lot of time looking at models on Instagram or watching dumb videos on TikTok, it is inevitable you are going to get a lot of complaints that they just can't get Kant.
&&&&
I put a lot of work into these blog posts. If you like them, why not subscribe? You choose how much you give and it's easy to do with Patreon or Pay Pal.
&&&&
Another point I raised was whether or not the reason why Snyder isn't getting any more grief from parents about what she is teaching is whether the ones that might complain have simply removed themselves from the educational system. Here are a couple of graphs from the Fraser Institute that suggest that much more people are either sending their children to private schools (the Fraser Institute calls them "Independent"---I suspect for ideological reasons) or homeschooling than when I was a child.
- Publicly funded, secular schools: 1,368,125
- Publicly funded, Catholic religious schools: 638,576
- Private schools of all types: 138,412
- Homeschooling: 8,565
Add together the students who go to a Catholic or private school, plus the ones who are homeschooled, and you get 785,553, or, 36% of the total student body.
I don't think that it strains credibility to suggest that the small number of parents who would have given Marie Snyder grief could easily fit into that 36% of the population who have removed their children from the public school system. This might make the lives of both teachers and parents in the public system easier, but I think this might not bode well for the future of Ontario. There is a standardized curriculum for Catholic, private, and, home-schooled children, but I suspect that critical thinking is probably not really encouraged for many of them. If it was, I suspect it would cause a lot of drama for the people in charge because the kids might question the whole reason why they have been removed from the public, secular system in the first place.
No comments:
Post a Comment