Critical thinking has so thoroughly colonized our idea of education that we tend to think it’s the only kind of thinking. Tests try to measure it, and ritzy private schools all claim to teach it. Critical thinking–analysis, not mere acceptance–is a skill we can all learn. And we’ve learned it too well. We’ve learned only critical thinking skills, and not the equally challenging skills of prudent acceptance: We don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.This sounds like a good line to try on that philosophy major chick you're trying to bang.
We teach students to find the undefended premises of an argument, or the contradictions in a claim. This is really easy.Easy? Teachers, do you agree?
Every single argument has a premise for which it doesn’t and can’t argue, and every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview!If some liberal were coming at her with a line like this, I imagine the words MORAL RELATIVISM would come flaming out of Tushnet's skull. But she's appealing to our higher unreasoning:
...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe"...
...And so we wait, and we keep our options endlessly open, hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands. “When I met your mother I just knew...” “And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven...”Lovely moments, surely, but how would you teach students to recognize them? "Tommy, look at Susie. Pretend she's the one for you, forever. Go!" "Well, Susie's nice and all but..." [Buzzer sounds, "F" dispensed.]
There's actually no place in education for such a thing, unless it's 1.) a cult leader's brainwashing session, or 2.) a school for religious instruction (but I repeat myself), which I suspect is the godly Tushnet's real model. Or, perhaps, a very bad classroom in which students are never challenged to go beyond what they already know, and are in fact given permission to stew in their own prejudices until they become a more transcendentally stupid version of themselves. You know -- the kind of place that folks who are always yapping about teacher "indoctrination" think a school should be.
We've been running with that old "reality-based community" thing for a while, but it never gets old because over time these people never get better at pretending that their real battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization.
UPDATE. Commenter Mortimer tells us this sort of thinking is popular even outside the meth labs of the right blogosphere -- from the Texas Republican Party 2012 platform (I don't know how I missed this):
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.Sara Robinson has a nice essay on critical thinking and schools at AlterNet, in which she also sticks up for teaching "the arts, crafts and humanities" -- something else Tushnet opposes ("we fetishize self-expression and novel or counterintuitive approaches to problems..."). They're so often wrong about everything important that it's hard to believe that isn't their goal.
...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth teaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well.
ReplyDeleteShorter Eve Tushnet: When you find yourself in the middle of an indoctrination don't fight, just lay back and enjoy it.
The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well.
ReplyDeleteDoes she identify this "somebody else". I have a feeling it's not Paul Krugman or the climate-science community.
or people of color.
ReplyDeleteIf you plow through the whole column, Tushnet doesn't really have an idea for how to work that into a curriculum. She instead links to something else she wrote on self-improvement, which pretty much comes down to "Have you considered converting to Catholicism?" After that she turns it over to the commenters, which is seldom a good idea (ahem). In this case, it turned up a bunch of coffee shop philosophy, about a quarter of which was actually on-topic.
ReplyDeleteOh, she also weaves it into another column about marriage and divorce - a column that quotes Vanilla Sky of all things, so I think I can guess where her "philosophy" is coming from. Ultimately, Tushman's real problem seems to be that there aren't more married Catholics around.
Yeah, I'd be interested in reading about what she'd say if her child came home one day and told her that she had a leap of faith and totally accepts the teachings of Muhammad.
ReplyDeleteCritical thinking is easy. Slackjawed acceptance is hard.
ReplyDeleteDid I miss something?
Tushnet is terrible here. Critical thinking, properly understood, encompasses everything she posits as good about thinking.
ReplyDelete"... every even mildly interesting worldview is built on conflict and internal tension. Not every contradiction is a reason to reject a worldview!"
What's more interesting is not necessarily more true. Offhand, I'd say we value "conflict and internal tension" in dramatic plots, somewhat like we value the play of dissonance and consonance in music, but in neither case should we confuse our heightened interest with ... well, here's the thing: we can reject a worldview, in whole or part, while acknowledging that something about it was interesting and provoked constructive thought.
"The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well."
Wrong, centuries of classics and lesser-knowns and good teachers DO teach students to get inside (as best we can, a question that's been considered at length) others' thoughts and feelings. "Devil's advocate," and all that. The adepts among us are master sophists as accomplished, perhaps more so, than any Greek or Roman leading light. A good liberal arts education still fits this bill, but conservatives aren't too keen on delivering those to the masses.
Teaching when to make a leap of faith: that's pragmatism; we've no time to answer even dire questions before acting as best we can. The student who wants schooling in pragmatism can find instruction. And, particularly in our multicultural strongholds, anyone who wants to pursue one Practice or another without subjecting it to Critique may readily do so. For all my faith in reason, I think that carefully doing things while withholding judgment can be a wonderful way to learn and grow, rather like stages of the scientific method, perhaps.
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You answer her extremely shallow points well.
ReplyDeleteEven Shorter Eve Tushnet: I love Big Brother.
ReplyDeleteWhat's most ridiculous is not that she thinks people ought to rely more on impulse and blind faith and less on thinking. No, what's most ridiculous is that she thinks people need to be taught that. As if going with the flow, turning a blind eye, trusting authority, doing things without deeply understanding them, making rash choices, and everything else weren't part of the natural human condition. As if most people don't spend their lives doing those things, and it's the rare people who have the mental wherewithal, let alone the time, energy, and power, to change things. People don't need to be taught those things any more than they need to be taught to eat and sleep. The goal of education is to provide counterweights to those natural responses, to give people more of an arsenal to deal with problems than basic self-preservation instincts. And dumber still is the idea that this all needs to be taught in a classroom. Living real life, dealing with circumstances that spiral beyond your control, be they a shitty job or a bad relationship or a sick child, will teach you how to accept imperfection and go with whatever you have available pretty damn quick. And again, the reason academia is different is that it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be a place where critical thinking and in-depth analysis can be the star of the show, rather than just things you do when you don't have life to take care of. Conservatives (and some liberals) always gripe about classrooms being too detached from reality, but they don't stop to think, maybe there's a good reason for that.
ReplyDeleteI swear, the bald anti-intellectualism for its own sake you get when the right feels comfortable displaying it is just breathtaking. 'Education should be less about thinking.' Sweet mercy, I don't even know how to parody that. It's already reached the maximum level of stupidity.
Attention Eve Tushnet. Schools don't need to push the value of going along to get along. We don't need to teach our children that the correct response to "Jump" is "How high?" Life and its crushing disappointments, piggish employers, and personal inertial will all hammer that one home quickly enough.
ReplyDelete... but not Big Sister. She seems kind of butch.
ReplyDeleteI feel for her, actually. Everyone in her family is an intellectual powerhouse ... except her. This is the purest expression of her rejection of their gifts.
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I would like to award this comment an honorary Ph.D. and applaud it when it stands up and makes the valedictory address at the ceremony.
ReplyDelete"... because over time these people never get better at pretending that their
ReplyDeletereal battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization."
Wonderfully nutshellish, that. I imagine that Tushnet's got hundreds, nay, thousands, of emergent Enlightenment characters spinning in their graves at, oh, about 7000 rpm.
But, yes, educators are frequently harping on critical thinking skills, but not for the reasons Tushnet (doesn't that sound like a vaguely racy rest stop on the Information Superhighway?) ascribes. It's because critical thinking skills--by any number of measurements--are declining, in no small part due to the emphasis on rote learning and regurgitation encouraged by NCLB and RT3 and Michelle Rhee, and by gawd knows how many avaricious and presumptuous revenue stream-obsessed billionaires who think that making education more like manufacturing is the wave of the future, not to mention the corrosive effects of modern psychology-driven advertising on one's ability to reason.
We got an object lesson in the destructive power of simple, concessionary belief after 9/11, and this lunatic wants more of it?
Yes, I'm sure that this woman wants many more converts to the Church of the New Trinity (Ryan, Cruz and Gohmert), but, to the critical thinkers still left, that's not a solution to the problem, but the problem itself.
(doesn't that sound like a vaguely racy rest stop on the Information Superhighway?)
ReplyDeleteI was thinking some odd form of underwear. "Oh, crap, my tushnet's riding up in the back again."
Authoritarian conservatives are fully in support of indoctrination; they just want to be in charge. (Also, too, those damn hippie teachers are ruining everything!)
ReplyDeleteIt is indeed fascinating to see more and more conservatives (the Texas school board, Tushnet) openly attack critical thinking. (Meanwhile, the smug glibertarians at Reason like to pretend they're the only ones who can achieve it.) In Tushnet's description, she misses that "dwelling" on someone else's ideas is a necessary part of critical thinking, not something in opposition to it, but of course, the term she really wants is "unquestioning obedience." Still, I always enjoy it when they at least sorta come out and honesty state their agenda.
(I'm reminded of Teaching as a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner and its chapter "Crap Detecting." Hey, if corrupting the youth was good enough for Socrates…)
Chillingly, she is taking baby steps toward equating critical thinking with thoughtcrime and promoting the practice of what Orwell called "Crimestop:”
ReplyDeleteCrimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
Protective stupidity: when you're tired of losing arguments to liberals don't give in, simply persuade members of society to become imbeciles just like you.
Lie back and think of Ayn Rand.
ReplyDelete(With an engraved invitation.)
... It's already reached the maximum level of stupidity ...
ReplyDeleteThe current maximum maybe, but just wait. Somewhere some conservative is already writing something even stupider.
I used to read her blog from time to time. Tushnet's gay. But she's Catholic and God comes first. She admits that she'll never be attracted to a man, and marriage or even a physical relationship with a woman would be a sin, so she has to remain celibate and alone for life. But it's OK because that's what God wants. You can see why she'd like to sink into a warm oozy swamp of acceptance, but somewhere in the back of her mind she must have the nagging thought that one day she'll meet God and he'll say "You silly bint, I gave you life so that you could enjoy it, not turn yourself into a martyr."
ReplyDeleteWe don’t even realize that we need to learn when to say yes, and to what.
ReplyDeleteI really think that comes as a side-effect of critical thinking.
“And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven...”
If Saul had been using his critical-thinking skills in the first place, perhaps he wouldn't have needed the Light from Heaven to convince him to stop persecuting people for deviating from the state religion.
"The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well."
ReplyDeleteIIRC That's a direct lift from The Stalker's Handbook, (Olympia Press 1972)
I think this explains a lot. Sadly. :/
ReplyDeleteLots of good cover art for editions of "Indoctrinaire" but I think I prefer this one.
ReplyDeletehttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0YONQ70WSHI/T0GKsbgO4TI/AAAAAAAAG_Y/s_eF4FSAi3c/s1600/Indoctrinaire.jpg
A bit ironic that she quotes from a film whose original title (of the original film) is "Abre Los Ojos" - Open Your Eyes.
ReplyDeleteWhat next? Accidentally quoting from "Wake Up" by Rage Against The Machine in a piece about not challenging authority?
Also "hoping that some lightning-strike revelation will take the decision out of our hands".
ReplyDelete"When I met her I just knew", but regrettably she did not feel the same way, hence the restraining orders.
Ooh, I love this: "We don’t even realize that we
ReplyDeleteneed to learn when to say yes, and to what." That's what the critical thinking shit is FOR. And fuck Søren K. and his leap of faith. I got, not a contact high, but a sort of contact embarrassment, when I got to that part of his philosphy. Like I always do when smart people twist themselves into weird knots in order to keep believing dumb shit.
I don't understand this comment at all, but I will rise and follow it. And this comments people shall be my people.
ReplyDeleteOh. Wow.
ReplyDeleteSo I read what Miz Tushnet - Ru-Paul's Drag Race contestant name, hollah! - had to say and I had this flash of insight: "I mean, say what you like about the tenets of [whatever The American Conservative is peddling], Dude, at least it's an ethos."
ReplyDeleteWhat's Megan McArgle got to do with this?
ReplyDeleteI may have mentioned this before, but the right-wing assault on critical thinking percolates from the fever swamps.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Texas GOP platform:
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.
For winger thought from A to Z
Check out the Texas GOP!
Again, as with nearly every conservatoid attempt to wrestle society closer to the cliff, this woman is pretending to live in a world that doesn't exist.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone really suspect our public education system to be even attempting to teach critical thinking skills, much less be effective in doing so? Seriously?
Almost since the get-go, public education has been a tool for the elites to massage conformity into every nook and cranny of developing future factory workers. Underpaid, under-appreciated, and certainly under-supported teachers are lucky to get through the monotonous drills of NCLB bullshit to churn out more under-educated cogs for the big wheels of capitalism. Kids are bullied into suicide on a nearly weekly basis because they stand out as targets through their non-conformity. And on and on, ad nauseum.
To claim that our society is fixated on "critical thinking" just because this woman reads about it a lot in academic circles, is like claiming we are an egalitarian people just because we go on and on about racism and misogyny.
Oh wait....I forgot that conservatoids claim that, too.
Shorter Tushnet: "Durn skewls are teaching our kids to not just buy the 'tax cuts increase revenue' and 'an invisible man in the sky is very concerned about your genitals' lines any more! They've gotta GO!"
ReplyDeletehave the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs
ReplyDeleteYou might think that when a student has fixed unchallengeable beliefs -- or parents with fixed beliefs on what the student's fixed beliefs should be -- then there is little need for *any* kind of education.
I feel a need to add: this type of bizarrely anti-reality, openly idiotic ranting, is indicative of a people who do not, cannot, see rational solutions to societal problems and are terrified by the Universe. For all their pretense, conservatoid philosophy is not just an attempt to solve problems and conflicts, as with normal humans, it is an IDENTITY.
ReplyDeleteWhen this Identity is challenged or disproved, through "critical thinking," rational argument, example, or even through accident of fate, they do not reevaluate and reassess, as rational actors should do, they instead feel personally threatened. Their worldview is equal to their personal survival and existence, and any challenge is met with the terrified resistance of Life or Death reactionary behavior.
I suppose this is why they constantly push for conformity. They must feel that if Everyone was in the same boat, there would be no challenge to their worldview, hence all peace and love and eternal life.
I really don't know what goes on in their cramped little minds, but I sure wish they would take their fucking blinders off and join the rest of us fighting the real challenges to human survival and progress.
(Evangelical hat on)
ReplyDeletePaul's letter to the Hebrews (!!), chapter 11, verse 1: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen
(Evangelical hat off, cynic's hat on)
Step 1: Ban critical thinking, replace with "faith"
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit!
A rug that ugly never tied together fuck.
ReplyDeleteTushnet is the opposite of Skynet, right?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wlsd9mljiU
~
I await the new Tushnet Teaching Paradigm wherein students don't have to think about it and can simply accept that Pi = 3.0, just like the Bible sez.
ReplyDeleteSome fantastic engineering is certain to follow.
What the actual fuck? Sorry, that's all I can muster up. As always Roy, I love your stuff. Keep it up.
ReplyDeleteThere's about half of a good movie in T3...
ReplyDeleteAlternative shorter Tushnet, videogame edition: The Reapers are our friends!
ReplyDeleteSo where I have I heard someone say Yes, and yes?
ReplyDeleteIs Tushnet recommending the last section of Joyce's Ulysses? Somehow I doubt it.
These arguments against critical thinking remind me of a crazy theory I had once: that Jenny McCarthy is the humanoid avatar of an intelligent virus--a sentient mutant form of the mumps--that is pushing the antivax cause so that it can thrive. The true horror beyond rational space that wants to rule our universe isn't some squid-bat thing, it's Dumbth.
ReplyDeleteShorter Eve Tushnet: If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5diMImYIIA
Or Charles Darwin.
ReplyDelete"The art of accepting somebody else’s thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your own as well."
ReplyDeleteOh, of course: "the art." Everything is an "art," especially when it comes to practices *they* think *you* should cultivate. "I suggest you learn the art of appreciating the Designated Hitter, voting against tax increases, and not wearing denim on Casual Fridays."
Meanwhile, it's come to this: the sometimes not-insane, not-stupid, not-kneejerk-Republican American Conservative publishes a piece in which a "conservative" calls the blind acceptance of someone else's argument or world view an "art"--and calls for schools to inculcate it. As opposed to, say, teaching the best that has been thought, written, and said, by people over the centuries, why it's the best, and what it means.
This is the sort of patently idiotic nonsense you expect to see on The American Thinker or TownHall. Harsh words, yes, and I mean them to sting.
Mmm, just imagine all those sexy tentacles sliding over your body while you accept that low tax rates fuel business and bring in more revenue.
ReplyDelete...What we don’t teach, and don’t even consider as something worth
ReplyDeleteteaching, is the art of acceptance. The art of accepting somebody else’s
thoughts, words, insights, and dwelling in them until they become your
own as well. We don’t teach how to tell when you’re sure enough, when
you really should take the leap of faith, when you should say, “Yes, my
understanding is totally inadequate, but I believe"...
When we were deciding on which kindergarten to enroll my son in, we visited several that were available to us in our local school district. I recall watching a classroom of 5 year olds assembling Christmas wreaths from colored construction paper, and while we watched, one child was putting little green dots among the cut-out holly leaves. "No no no!" one teacher's aide rebuked her. "The berries have to be RED! They can't be GREEN."
That's the kind of "accepting somebody else's thoughts and words" I think Tushnet advoccates here.
Wait, so is her problem that students are being taught to question their liberal indoctrination?
ReplyDeleteNow I'm imagining a slashy, Rule 63 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
ReplyDeleteShorter Texas GOP platform:
ReplyDeleteBecause, SHUT UP, that's why!
I think you should send this idea to John Rogers, aka Kung fu monkey, it's surprisingly like his new comic book crossed with Alan moored version of swamp thing where the big reveal is that swamp thing is not a man transformed into a plant but a plant that thinks its a man. Also very like the argument made in the new book about marijuana which is basically that marijuana is using human drug growers to propagate and refine itself and turn previously inhospitable growth area (like deserts and closets) into habitats for growth.
ReplyDeleteI figure we're in Act 1 of an Onionoid spoof, and we're gonna feel really stupid when the Act 2 curtain goes up...
ReplyDeleteOr, to paraquote every redneck you ever knew, "Well, dammit, let's believe something, even if it's wrong"...
ReplyDeleteWell, there's my biggest problem with God... He never says anything clearly and unambiguously until it's too late. Unless you insist on paying attention to the batshit craziness of Leviticus, that is.
ReplyDeleteLightning strike, huh? Does she mean something like Saul on the road to Damascus?
ReplyDeleteWingnuts have been banging away on the subject of "Objectivity" since William F. Buckley founded The National Review. To a true winger, "objectivity" means either " Even though 9000 climate scientists have proven that burning fossil fuels is causing global warming to increase, here's an oil company "scientist" that says it's not, so obviously, both views need to be considered equally valid (applicable to economic theories as well), or "sure, paleontologists and geologists haven proven that evolution causes biodiversity and the Earth is about 4.7 billion years old, but my faith tells me that the Earth is 6000 years old and evolution contradicts God's word, so TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!!!". I'm sure that if "Critical Thinking" were defined the way wingers already define "Obectivity", Tushnet would have no problem with it.
ReplyDeleteIf I hadn't had teachers/professors who "challenged my fixed beliefs," I would be dumb as a stump right now. I mean, have you MET any kids lately? They have some pretty idiotic fixed beliefs. Not that it wasn't obvious, but it's still kind of amazing to me that the GOP is willing to come out and ADMIT that their goal is to make us into a nation of incurious six-year-olds.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I kinda already stole the idea from a comic that Moore did, about a Superman clone named Mr. Majestic, which featured a sentient version of syphilis.
ReplyDeleteOh Alan Moore! How I love you--you crazy kook!
ReplyDeleteWho's to say there aren't thousands of crimestop bots crawling the webs as we speak, seeking out critical....errr....hey, so is anyone else watching the NHL playoffs?
ReplyDeleteThere's probably a shadow of a nugget of a seed of a thought in there, that could be expanded upon by a sane person and applied to the kind of 'critical thinking gone horribly awry' that is used by conspiracy theorists. The "critical of claims by mainstream authorities, but a total sucker for anyone else's nonsense" kind of "critical thinking".
ReplyDeleteBut I don't think that's where she was going.
Me too - plus, I would like to take it out back during the reception/afterparty and smoke weed with it while everybody else is still drinking bad box wine.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's really sad. So sorry for her.
ReplyDeleteI admit, the first thought I had when I read Tushnet's article was, "Does she have any evidence that critical thinking is particularly stressed or well taught in American curricula?"
ReplyDeleteI guess that makes me part of the problem.
There is? Where?
ReplyDeleteBig deal. I imagine that all the time.
ReplyDeleteTushnet's (and Texas') statements make me feel physically ill. So I'll read comments and maybe they'll cheer me a bit. Goddam! I want to run away to Venus where my real parents live. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteI wish this comment was a Teacher.
ReplyDeleteSeriously? Man, how can you do something like that with a straight face after this? I mean, I thought it was kind of heavy-handed at the time, but...
ReplyDeleteYou've helped me focus on the fact that there really is a person named Tushnet posting on the interwebs. I know babies have been named Facebook by their parents, but...
ReplyDeleteThe sky above, the tush below.
ReplyDelete". . . their real battle is not with liberalism but with Western Civilization."
ReplyDeleteAs I never tire pointing out, we are all Medieval Americans now.
What I want to know is, what happens now to all that "teach creationism/Intelligent Design to improve critical thinking" stuff?
ReplyDeleteI'd feel sorrier for her if she weren't trying to convince everyone else to be as miserable as she is.
ReplyDeleteI feel bad for her, too - but does anyone know why she's doing this?
ReplyDelete