Hacker News Reader

Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

30 years ago we called this "critical thinking", something schools have always had a lot trouble with, in part because critical thinking is a weapon against illegitimate authority, which schools also have a lot of trouble with.

View on HN

Also because teachers have trouble with it. I’d guess out of all the teachers I had at a decent public school, probably only 1 in 5 could be reasonably considered critical thinkers.

I’d guess 2 in 5 were actively hostile to the concept and the rest were just ambivalent.

Illegitimate (or at least arbitrary) authority is something schools seem to thrive on. Our school had a staircase you could only go up and one you could only go down and you got yelled at if you went the wrong direction. Naturally the building wasn’t made by insane people so the stairs were on opposite ends, this meant if you had to go downstairs but were near the “up only stairs” you had to traverse the entire building and would be late with 3min class change times (and you couldn’t run either).

We also couldn’t talk during the second half of lunch because it was too loud for the lunch monitors.

Underpaid, low status jobs with unions that prevent people from getting fired is a great way to end up with dumb, awful people in those positions. I was lucky there were a few great teachers at all given those incentives.

> Underpaid, low status jobs

To me this is the critical problem. Education is an incredibly important part of a well-functioning society, but we treat teachers very poorly. We need to elevate teachers, both in the training & expertise needed as well as the pay and autonomy we provide them.

Married to a teacher.

Logic has no part in most elementary classrooms.

I argue we need to go dumber.

Have a basic certification that you can teach vowel sounds. Bring in plenty of cheap people to lower grades and have them work 1 on 1 with each student.

Seen way to much of teachers teaching to what the kids are supposed to be capable of, vs what they actually are.

I've seen the inside of an elementary grade classroom before, and I agree with you 100%. So many American children and even adults mispronounce vowel sounds, it's scary. Something around 60% of American adults look at a simple word like "iron" and say something that resembles "I yearn." Did no one tell them how it sounds?

I like you. Including your username. I'm surprised your comments aren't down voted more. They're honest. People don't seem to like that these days.

Reach out and touch me.

Was in a senior in high school French. Teacher was explaining how to translate present participle. Complete blank stares. Only thing anyone knew was noun and verb. Teacher had a complete meltdown.

So for next week em the entire school, every English class was School house Rock videos.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DCdt8-H1BFY&feature=youtu.be

What does that have to do with what you replied to?

I trust you pronounce "knight" and "whale" the way that gave them that spelling instead of relying on your inventory of sounds and phonotactics that you picked up from your community of native speakers.

That's why you vote for lower taxes so you can reinvest the savings in the local private school!

My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them. That said, it's probably reasonable for schools to try to propagate some set of standard ideologies which parents can then modulate by offering their own opinions. The place this probably doesn't work so well is situations where parents are either absent or radicalized in some way. Unsurprisingly, those two situations do seem to be where a lot of social problems originate.

Have you spoken to the school about your concerns? Do your children know about your reservations with what they are being taught?

Children can be taught to believe basically anything, easily. Teaching them to question and then things through comes much later.

Got a a decent dose of class warfare ideology growing up. Spent years after college reading various opinions before finally settling on my own beliefs. My oldest asks me who to vote for. She gets annoyed when I try and explain the various viewpoints of each candidate, and some pros and cons.

I now firmly hold the belief that it’s immoral to vote if you can’t be bothered to study up on some basics. Like a what is a bond.

I'm not overly concerned about it. It's my job as a parent to modulate the information they receive with school, and I'm fine with that. The most challenging part about it is they are asked to do assignments whose responses contain a strong political element, meaning there is a "right" opinion the teacher wants to hear. Again, that doesn't overly bother me. That's life, and my kids need to learn to operate in politically charged environments.

Yes, my children know what I think, and we discuss everything openly.

You're more at peace with the situation than I would be. I have an angry reaction to the idea that my children are being politically indoctrinated in such an obvious way - especially with such a shaky and activist foundation.

> My kids are being taught a lot of critical race theory concepts in their middle school which, to put it charitably, don't have a whole lot of objective data behind them.

Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?

>Can you give examples of the concepts you mention your kids are being taught in their middle school?

Probably something in the line of this:

https://www.nasponline.org/resources-and-publications/resour...

or this

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/learning/lesson-plans/tea...

I'm concerned about saying something political that triggers a flood of downvotes, so I'd rather be pretty vague here. One example is their primary US history textbook is kids version of Howard Zinn's People's History of the US.

I have no problem with Zinn's book in general, but I do think it's best read in the context of knowing the "official" version of history. I normally view his book as a useful critique and extension of a classic history text.

To modulate the Zinn book, I simply review with my kids the relevant Wikipedia entries to ensure they have more context. This works great in my family. My concern would be the outcome in a family without engaged parents or radicalized parents, as I mentioned above.

>"official" version of history

What's that?

Probably something like this: https://christopherrufo.com/woke-elementary/

A lot of examples on that site.

I am sorry that your kids are being indoctrinated with CRT. I will pull my kids from public school before they are "taught" CRT. The goal of a school should be to teach how to think for yourself and provide tools to solve problems. Telling children what they are supposed to think has no place in school.

Please read the rest of my comments on this thread. I don't think you should pull your kids out of school. Simply sit with them and help modulate the information. Learning to operate in the context of CRT is simply part of how their lives will be, assuming they live in / remain in the US.

I did read your comments. And we do provide a wide array of view points. We are currently home schooling because of COVID. However, I will not reward a school district with government funding attached to my children if they are going to be a mouthpiece for political indoctrination. There is danger in allowing CRT to persist in schools. You are able to modulate the ideas for your children. But, the concern, as you have expressed, is that not all parents can do the same or have already drank the kool-aid. The majority of children being taught CRT are not going to be offered modulating ideas. I fear that 20 years down the road as these kids come into power we are in for a new flavor of racist policies driven by the divisive ideas of CRT.

I do agree that the best counter for bad ideas is talking about better ideas and comparing them. Which, to the point of the article, is the crux of critical thinking skills.

I'm not saying that my trek through public school was free of political indoctrination. DARE drug education was pervasive. There is a big difference between "drugs are bad mkay..." and "you're white so you are inherently racist".

I hear you. I just think it's important for my kids to be in contact with the culture, such as it is. I don't envy them having to grapple with the concerns you mentioned. I agree that DARE (which had its share of issues) was a lot less questionable than the current social agenda.

Schools are always mouthpieces. Where I grew up in the 90s in Southern California, the public high school I went to was proud of the fact that they'd figured out a way to have a school-funded evangelical christian club that met weekly on campus (and had hundreds of members). My English teacher taught a class called "Bible as Literature" which was overtly religious even thought it wasn't supposed to be, and she was well-known to be a born-again christian. The P.E. teacher at my public middle school used to make us all stand on our numbers while he told us stories about how Jesus got him through his time in the Marines.

None of this is great, but it's just the way life is, and I believe it's important for my kids to understand, in context provided by my wife and I, how society all fits together. School is an important part of that, in my opinion.

> Telling children what they are supposed to think has no place in school.

Funny I thought that was all that school was supposed to do.

Schools should teach children how to learn, then all else will fall in line.

There's always a degree of indictrination, it's just about where one draws the line.

I was taught racism is bad, and in the literal sense that is an opinion, its just one that our society takes for granted now.

"Critical thinking, as we’re taught to do it, isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation", argues NYT [1]. I profoundly disagree, but this way of thinking seems to be the modern trend, influenced by postmodernism.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/fake-news-media-a...

It's also really hard to measure, and just like everything nowadays, there has to be KPIs and metrics everywhere. No one relies on gut feeling or what they think is best anymore, too afraid to stick their neck out without data to back it up, no matter how iffy the data is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com