Tag: critical thinking

How California Is Embracing Mandatory Racial-Injustice Study for All of Its 1.7 Million High Schoolers

The latest curriculum, however scaled back, still shares similarities with an earlier, rejected draft that a top state official said failed to comply with state law, and the Los Angeles Times editorial board characterized as a jumble of “politically correct pronouncements” that feel like “an exercise in groupthink, designed to proselytize and inculcate more than to inform and open minds.”

When all is said and done, the material emphasizing whites’ subjugation of non-whites is not a conventional textbook subject, but an ideology with an activist political agenda. Revisions may never satisfy parents and teachers who believe public schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching kids how to develop a “social consciousness” or using class time to pinpoint a student’s intersectional identity to determine where they fit on a hierarchy of power.

At the same time, ethnic studies activists are furious that their efforts at promoting social justice, and centering “voices of color” are being diluted by, as they put it, power structures such as “whiteness,” Zionism and assimilationism.

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“Don’t Go Down The Rabbit Hole!” — NY Times Decries Critical Thinking Tells Us to Trust Google Instead

A new article from the New York Times claims that instead of engaging with someone who challenges your worldview, you should “resist the lure of Rabbit Holes” and go to more authoritative sources such as Google and Wikipedia.

The New York Times appears to have declared war on traditional critical thinking, which they say “isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”.

Sharing the insights of “a digital literacy expert” named Michael Caulfield, the article reads as follows:

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

In other words: Resist the lure of rabbit holes, in part, by reimagining media literacy for the internet hellscape we occupy.

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