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More (not so) fun facts:
54% of American adults read below a 6th grade level.
21% read below a 5th grade level, which is considered functionally illiterate.
High immigration numbers don't fully explain it either, as first gen immigrants only make up about 1/3 of those with low literacy.
They were supposed to bring critical thinking to the high schools and conservative parents in the US threw a shit fit because they truly believed their kids would no longer believe what they did. We never got critical thinking in high school and most people don't get an introduction to it until college.
Critical thinking should start in kindergarten and by third grade children should be able to create a simple opinion based on facts they understand. We are doing such a disservice to young people it isn't funny.
I'm not sure if it played out quite like that originally, though I guess there would be some people's parents thinking that way, especially in 2026. Keep in mind, NCLB was bipartisan.
In 2003, though, I read that the reality for a majority of schools is a bit more stupid, they don't understand testing and statistics at the federal level and designed a system of accountability that promoted teach-to-the-test methods, which is mostly memorization. That's because low performing schools (read: poor schools) got punished for not meeting an arbitrary test score, so it was a go to survival tactic.
Conservatives still get their desired result, though, which is an education system with minimal critical thinking practiced. Perhaps it was a poison pill, or something, given it's made Americans by and large even dumber since then (and we were already doing bad for other reasons and Reagan).
This was back in 2012ish when the Republican Party platform was the following.
"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."
Yeah, can't have it in high school because that's lib-rule college shit.
That's around when the tea party movement was taking off, so that tracks. You see the seeds of what we see today back even in 2008, too; but to bring it back to reading deficits, we've had problems long before then (which, obviously, snowball into what we see today, e.g. Florida banning sociology and such).
Ooh, I kind of forgot about the madness of schools being funded mainly by their local neighborhood, making schools in poor neighbourhoods poor. Could it be that increased segregation or relative marginalization have had an impact significant enough to bring the mean down?
That's quite correct, but it's two fold. Even if you have funding from the state and feda (which we do get to offset this effect), the home lives of these kids are generally much worse than middle and upper neighborhoods, which also brings down the mean. We're talking pollution, 80 hour work weeks, higher incarceration, etc. it all brings down the mean.
Then the feds have the gall to REDUCE funding if schools can't bring themselves to by the bootstraps? It's awful. That said, Obama admin did help a little in this regard, since at least they did listen to the educational research on this.
liberal parents also hate critical thinking. it's not a partisan issue.
i live an in ultra liberal city and the parents are 100% against critical thinking here too. they just want their orthodoxies taught instead of conservative ones.
If you can produce official platform comments that the Democratic party was against critical thought like the Republicans are on record saying then I could believe you.
Otherwise I am going to chalk it up to your excessive devil's advocate nonsense.
Democratic party supports identity politics. that's the antithesis of critical thinking.... lol
one of the key reasons Harris' campaign was so terrible and was poorly supported was her active embrace of ID politics above common sense economics. to the point that many minorities didn't support her because they recognized how backwards Democratic were on immigration and other social issues.
and the Dems continue to support his nonsense despite how incredibly unpopular it makes them.
Yeah, that is what I thought.
So you think ID politics is critical thinking?
Or is critical thinking... not judging people by their race and sex, but evaluating them on their individual merits and circumstances, each with their own set of concerns?
No, that you were just playing devil's advocate with nothing to back you up.
You are confusing critical race theory with critical thinking. I had a heck of a time researching this because all that would pop up in a search was critical race theory. It was annoying.
No, the democrats are doing that.
The people of the democratic party are playing devil's advocate or they are confusing critical race theory for critical thinking on web searches?
The democratic platform, nationally, has mistaken pushing/promiting ID politics as policy, (of which CRT is one subset) for critical thinking or improving economic conditions for people regardless of their race, sex, or nationality.
It was a hallmark policy of Biden's administration to create discriminatory policies that did nothing to help working-class voters, and largely benefited well-off minorities and women from the upper 5-10% of the economic spectrum. Because that's who promotes ID politics... a small group of well-off people who are totally disconnected from the average non-college going American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Identity_Trap
This is definitely confusing critical race theory and critical thinking. Although, I will admit you can't get to critical race theory without critical thinking so that is perhaps where our conservations meet in a roundabout way.
ID politics is a common political accusation that conservatives groups like to cry about. Unfortunately for them, they are the worst about ID politics using a number of wedge issues like abortion and of course their rural religious obsession to define their voting platform. Conservatives are the literal definition of ID politics hence why they project onto others. Every accusation is a confession definitely holds true here.
As with most things the concept of identity politics itself came from academics to describe how people can effectively organize. Like the term woke it was stolen by people who are incapable of understanding it and then demonized like conservatives love to do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics
No, it's active democratic policy. but you seem to be in denial that this is the case.
it's a political accusation, that is 100% true.
The fact that it's called "critical thinking" rubs me the wrong way. Makes it sound like there's also another way of thinking even though the alternative is just not thinking