by Rodolfo F. Acuña
I am having trouble getting into this
essay on the war on critical thinking. I cannot figure out whether it is dumb
or ignorant. My mother would say that the people conducting the war are
malditos, mean. The reality is that the criminalization of rational
thought goes beyond being dumb, ignorant or just plain mean.
Because the consequences are so
calculated and far reaching, it is important to break it down so everyone can
understand it and where we are headed.
Fascism did not start on February 27,
1933 with the burning of the Reichstag building in Berlin; it did not begin
with the building of concentration camps after the fire. It was all planned and
a strategy of division, doubt, and fear simply bore fruit at this point.
Hitler summed up his strategy; he
sowed the seeds of “mental confusion, contradiction of feelings, indecision,
[and] panic.”
Hitler and his gang set out to stamp
out all vestiges of freedom and decency in German society. It is a story goes
back to the early 1920’s and was formed after great forethought.
It used symbols such as the black
swastika within the white circle, triggering images of hate toward Jews.
Similarly, the Tea Party movement uses the flag with the circle of stars, the
border and the tea kettle to nurture fear and hate.
The process of “mental confusion,
contradiction of feelings, indecision, panic” follow a blueprint. You watch Tea
Party rallies play to mobs that identify with a distorted sense of nationalism;
the speakers playing to the fears of the dumb, ignorant and malditos.
In the United States, the Tea Party
has been taken over by corporate interests. The involvement of the Koch
brothers is well documented. Like the Nazis it has integrated friendly
media such as Fox News and a network of right-wing radio talk shows that include
scores of hate-mongers such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage who are
supported by dozens of other radio hosts and guests.
The message is redundant.
In Germany it was the fear of attacks
from without – the invasion of aliens from within -- who would infect their
racial purity and rob them of the bounties of the German Nation. The Tea Party
following a similar plan has substituted the word “illegal alien” for Jew.
The excesses are discernible even at
this early stage. One can see the parallels with the Tea Party’s alliances with
so-called Minutemen who can justify the murder of a nine-year old Mexican girl,
Briseña Flores.
These parallels hit me over the head
when I read my friend Devon Peña’s blog, one of the more intelligence on the
internet. Devon is one of the few Chicano intellectuals that I know who
thinks outside the box.
(See Devon G. Peña,
“Fear & Loathing in Texas: State Republican Party Seeks to Ban Critical
Thinking in Public Schools Platform Prohibits Teach Higher Order Thinking Skills,”
July 1, 2012 http://mexmigration.blogspot.com/2012/06/fear-loathing-in-texas.html)
Peña’s blog follows the Texas State
Board of Education and its adoption of high school social studies and history
curriculum standards. The Texas body is a collection of extremists who mirror
the fanaticism of the gaggle in Phoenix.
In 2010, it attempted to adopt
standards which declared war on the truth. It began with the ridiculous
rationale that the Constitution did not provide for the separation of church
and state. They said that the words were not in the Constitution. Telling they
did not bother to read the Federalist Papers.
Conservatives insisted that the U.S.
government be referred to as a "constitutional republic," rather than
"democratic.”
The new standards required students to
study how global organizations such as the United Nations undermine U.S.
sovereignty.
Efforts of the Texas American Civil
Liberties Union failed to rein in the State Board of Education and politicized
what was taught to Texas school children.
Back to Hitler’s take on education:
"Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that
liberalism has ever invented." In Mein Kampf he stated "Through
clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see
paradise as hell, and also the other way round."
The Nazi party did not openly purge
existing professors if they conformed. It implemented a plan to transform the
profession by controlling entry and promotion within it. Teachers could either
conform or resign.
The Nazis also moved to block the
negative influence of parents and traditional culture. The Party moved to
revise history. It saw that the problem that the teaching of history was not
guided and taught by Nazi standards – the truth did not matter.
Enter the 2012 Texas Republican Party
Platform:
“Knowledge-Based Education – 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
and undermining parental authority.”
Peña asks, “Where does this Republican
fear of critical thinking come from?” He deduces: “HB2281, the law
banning the teaching of Chicana/o Studies in public schools, or that Texas
public schools are now filled with a majority [Latino].” The motivating factor
was that Latino students now make up just over 50 percent of Texas schools.
John Huppenthal, the Arizona
Superintendent of Schools, appearing on Fox News Latino, said, “this toxic
thing [critical thinking] starts from, the universities.” Proponents of HB 2281
see critical thinking as “un-American and a threat to Western civilization and
culture….”
This dumb, ignorant, and mean spirited
movement is spreading, following the same path as the anti-immigrant movement.
In Tennessee Tea Party groups
introduced a proposal to take minorities out of American history textbooks. It
also proposed to remove negative portrayals of the wealthy white men and
references to them as slaveholders or mention of the Indian genocide.
Rep. Michele Bachmann once claimed
that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery. But, her saying
so does not make it true.
Why has the struggle in Texas then
been less intense than in Arizona? There are a lot of factors. It is not that
Texas politicos are less dumb, ignorant or malditos, but that with the size of
Arizona you can get a lot more bang for your buck. The Kochs, ALEC (American
Legislative Exchange Council), and the prison, gun, and charter school
interests have hijacked the Republican Party and silenced the Democratic Party
and most progressives in the state. In Texas you have a critical mass of Latino
elected officials that can put a brake on extreme legislation, although some
creeps through.
The perfect storm occurred in Arizona,
and the effects are now spreading elsewhere.
What is this straw man called critical
thinking?
It is nothing new; it was not invented
by Mexican Americans to overthrow the government. It simply is a method of
teaching to engage the learner and motivate her to learn and understand
concepts. It is nothing new. Most civilizations engaged in it. American law
schools which some say are the bastions of conservative thought use the Socratic
Method, which is called the case book method. Cases are studied, analyzed and
the student seeks to learn the law rather than to repeat it.
Throughout history critical thinking
has been a threat to tyrants.
It was used extensively in the early
Christian Church where communities studied the early writings of prophets. The
Gnostics used this method extensively, and they were purged.
In recent times educational reformers
like John Dewey have differentiated between training and education. The object
of education was to engage the student in inquiry in a search for the truth.
The criminalization of rational
thought is of concern.
On July 4, 2012, The Chicago Tribune
reported the experience of a University of Chicago undergraduate volunteer at a
Southside school. He posed the question to the class: "Why do we need
laws?"
Immediately, nearly all 12 hands shot up. "To
make sure people don't go around being mean," one student said. Another
said: "We need laws because this world is falling apart. It's going
crazy."
Here the volunteer was acting as a
coach, much like on a football team when players engage in the subversive
process of critical thinking in critiquing game film.
This article is not into name calling.
People are dumb, ignorant and mean, but they are also greedy as the movie “Wall
Street” so graphically points out.
Greedy people want power and they
don’t strive for it solely because they are dumb, ignorant or mean. They
do it because they are able to manipulate others to follow them against their
own self-interests.
I am not saying that we are the same
as Nazi Germany in 1933 or 1939; however, there are parallels to its
development in 1921. We have to remember that Hitler came to power
because of massive U.S. and German financial and industrial collaboration.
American automaker Henry Ford invested
in Hitler’s rise as did the late US Senator Prescott Bush, Averill
Harriman, the Dulles brothers, German steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, and chemical
manufacturer I.G. Farben, among a score of others. They helped finance Hitler.
Why? Because they were dumb, ignorant and/or mean? No, because they profited.
The drive to make more profits makes
critical thinking and the preservation of a historical record a threat.
Please click on to the link and
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Sean Arce and José González Under
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