On an open house day at a private school in the area I once heard a teacher describe the course she taught as "Math With Numbers". Huh? It would have been a couple of minutes of real fun getting her to explain how you could do math without numbers but I didn’t have the energy for it. Progressives, especially Progressive educators (which most are) are blatherskites. They specialize in terms like "ability status" (unwarranted pride in getting a good mark) or confusing labels like "Sociolinguistics" (hint: another term for the same thing is "communicative competence".) They bang on and on about a fourth grader’s “portfolio” and write a 75,000-word thesis for their doctorate on the spacing of monkey bars.
There’s nothing, I’ve often reflected, that you’re going to learn from the way these people think in any language you’re going to understand and so, I don’t chat them up.
But I’ve always allowed that there was hope in their preoccupation with "critical thinking". Because while developing a child’s “critical thinking” skills always seemed to be the excuse for some absurdity in education I had always taken the term to mean an intellectual proficiency which helps one sift through available evidence until arriving at the truth of some matter.
But then I read an article in the Guardian online by Bobby Scott a black U.S. Congressman titled: “America's Schools Are Still Segregated by Race and Class.That Has To End”.
Read more:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/05/the_great_critical_thinking_dodge.html
