Teaching Critical Thinking in an Irrational Age

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Twenty years ago, when I began teaching writing, I tried to  teach critical thinking by presenting two opposing arguments and letting students work their way through each of them. I quickly learned that with certain arguments this led nowhere fast. Reason meet faith; debate over.

Many of my students are profoundly ant-intellectual. It’s not youthful sloth or ignorance or posturing, although there’s plenty of those things, youthful or otherwise, it’s a specific set of ideas they have been taught. It isn’t every religion, and it isn’t all Christian sects, but too many are raised to mistrust reason.

The problem, in a nutshell, is the Christian fundamentalist rejection of all substantive debate as such. This rejection, often termed the belief in the literal truth of the Bible, conflates faith with reason, and makes attempts to foment substantive intellectual discussion moot. It’s apples and oranges every time.

I think most of us deal with this problem by focusing on the language of debates that are more or less off of the radar of the Christian right. No more course sections on abortion, for example. The problem of Christian fundamentalist anti-intellectualism has only grown worse in the last decade, however.

We’ve reached a point, I think, where so much right-wing thinking is so dominated by this Christian fundamentalist thinking that much of our contemporary life seems off the table, from evolution to economics. How can you debate issues in evolution when one side believes the Earth is only 3,000 years old?

One solution is to find debates within arguments that are often seen as monolithic. The debate over gay marriage hides a less obvious critical  argument over marriage,  for example, a debate epitomized by  Queers for Economic Justice. It’s a good resource for framing a productive argument.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Professional

An Aging Luddite

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I work online, and I think online writing classes work at least as well as face to face teaching. I love technology and gadgets too, even though they are too often tainted by consumerism. I am not certain of the source, but someone left this Douglas Adams quote as a comment on my site recently:

First we thought the PC was a calculator.  Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter.  Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television.  With the World Wide Web, we’ve realized it’s a brochure.

I went on short trip last weekend to Meramec Caverns— my GPS is the greatest thing since sliced bread on these trips–and I was struck, once again, by the image of people waving their cell phones around in the air, trying to get what we euphemistically call “service.”

I understand the impulse. The motel and the campground that surrounds the caverns is old-fashioned and doesn’t have internet connection. (Many modern campsites do.)  I don’t use my cellphone much, and as long as there’s television of some sort, I’m fine. I felt that little twinge of anxiety, though, knowing that I couldn’t call anyone if I got lonely.

What’s making me feel more and more like a Luddite, though, is the sheer ubiquity of people– almost all of them under 40, and most under 30, who seem so helpless addicted to nothing. I enjoy Facebook, to cite this year’s model as an example, but there’s no there there;  you look at a picture or two,  or maybe follow a link someone shared, laugh at a video, and then you are done.

Why is the brochure is so compelling that it requires almost constant attention, almost as if it were a pet or a child? I don’t believe that this is generational. When I was young, say, a teenager, I loved rock and roll music, but I was also aware that some people went too far with it and became fanatics. It was embarrassing at best, at worst dysfunctional. This fanaticism about the latest trend has become the norm.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Language, Miscellaneous

Whitewashed History

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I have to agree with the letter writer who complained that the Chronicle of Higher Education ought to cover recent events in Arizona more thoroughly (“Controversial Arizona Law Deserves Scholars’ Attention“). A new law, HB 2281, represents the cutting edge in the long-expressed desire of the right-wing to eliminate ethic studies, as a part of their larger drive to end diversity programs in education. It’s another example of the irrationality of white supremacy, its profound fear that if it does not fully assimilate the other, its own unique identity will disappear.

In Arizona, the formula is very simple: either the people who are ethnically Mexican– most are not recent immigrants, of course–drop their own language and culture and adopt European American (“white”) cultural traditions and the English language or European American culture– and the English language–will be lost forever, at least on the American continent. White culture, this assumes, isn’t strong enough to co-exist with other cultures. Ethnic studies are designed to remedy this profound paranoia about the danger implicit in other cultures.

It’s not automatic or necessarily easy, but multiple cultures can and do co-exist peacefully.The “white” paranoia, too, is rooted in a profound misunderstanding of American history that downplays if not ignores the dynamics of multiple cultures that has shaped U.S. history, for good and ill, from the central role of slavery in the early U.S. economy to the Indian genocide to the Civil Rights movement to La Raza. H.B. 2281 is trying to create a dangerous institutionalized amnesia, the very opposite of what it means to be educated.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Professional, Writing

Nixon’s Revenge

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When we were kids in Texas, and we went to Mexico and ate something that we should not have eaten, we called the resulting diarrhea Montezuma’s revenge (people still do, of course). It has that authentic American racist feel to it, and it’s more than a little unfair to complain so cavalierly about a problem like dysentery, which is one of the scourges of poverty everywhere. Yet is also has a pointed irony, as if we recognized a kind of karma in genocide and colonialism.

The ongoing budget battles in the U.S., summarized in “State Lawmakers Seek More Say Over Colleges,” aren’t genocide, of course, but they do represent a kind of unfortunate political karma. Let’s call it Nixon’s revenge. Somehow– that somehow suggests an as yet undecipherable history– a portion of the U.S. electorate has become convinced that the only way to balance budgets is to make cuts. Since we spend so much on education, that means we have to cut there.

Yet if by “we” we mean the American people as represented by polls, then “we” don’t want these cuts. Arguably, they are in fact unnecessary, even in the most practical sense. If the “we” is the “we” that voted for the far right, though, then that “we” has given our body politic a bad case of political dysentery. Literally, a long dialog about nothing; discursive excrement. It’s Nixon’s revenge against the now grown up college kids who hated him so much.

We are being sold a bill of goods about education, to use the cliche, and we are buying it, in the same way that we were sold a bill of goods in Nixon’s “moral majority.” Or, in fact, in the same way that we have been sold things like the “pet rock.” I also don’t think it is historically inaccurate to say that only the much too tenuous power of people organized in unions is going to prevent some sort of final right wing solution to the “problem” of education.

Posted in: Economics, Language, Professional, Writing