Any update on this? and any chance you can send me an email so I can ask you some questions on this- newinternationaloutlook@gmail.com

There might be a disconnect between the Brahmin preaching and the Brahmin practice. Brahmins preach equality and critical thinking when they design curricula, pious equalists that they are, but in the classroom even they intuit that some kids just don’t get it — but the curriculum has already been designed to help “critical thinking” at this point, so there’s not much to be done. Everyone gets more “critical thinking” and less rote learning.

I will again emphasize that “critical thinking” is not the same as actual critical thinking. “Critical thinking” is what happens when equalist progressives try to turn the not-so-intelligent into deep and creative thinkers. The result is sophistry, feels, pandering, “tips & tricks” and low-grade Marxism. The intelligent suffer this too, because they’re in the same educational pipeline with the same curriculum and the same teachers.

And I think I’ve established how the doctrine of equality led to “critical thinking” fairly firmly — at least, how the logic of equality would lead to that outcome. If everyone is equal, asks the equalist, why are some people less intelligent than others? Cf. if men and women are equal, why are women worse at math than men? Well, the equalist says, it must be because the less intelligent just didn’t get enough education at being intelligent (“critical thinking”). Cf. it must be because of male privilege and patriarchy, women just need more math education (and money, and opportunities, etc.). The only reason we don’t hear about intelligent privilege is that it’s too absurd, even for an equalist. But we do see the not-so-intelligent getting more and more education, money and opportunities — like I said, resource sinks.

“I’m not necessarily saying critical thinking is awesome — the notion has its problems, and besides, it has a number of different definitions depending on whom you ask. But your argument is partly an historical one arguing for a causal relationship. Is this really true? It could be, but I need to see evidence.”

I wouldn’t quite call my argument a historical one, since I don’t claim to be a well-versed historian of education. My argument consists of taking the logic of universal human equality to its logical conclusion, and noting that the insanity at the end of that road is consistent with the observations I’ve made about modern education IRL.

As for the notion of critical thinking, well, you’ve got critical thinking and you’ve got “critical thinking.” Critical thinking is what intelligent people can do naturally, and perhaps improve with instruction from other intelligent people. “Critical thinking” is what I mentioned above: in theory, turning the dim into the bright, in practice, sophistry, feels, pandering, etc. — the litany of expected mediocrities that occur when you shove a square peg into a round hole. Resource sinks.

“In my view, “critical thinking” questions aren’t always bad. The real problem is that humanities and social science (especially history) classes desperately need curriculum reform. With unchallenging requirements, teachers find themselves having to ask “critical thinking” questions just to facilitate discussion and kill time. Plus, with the current curriculum for most schools, the bare facts are somewhat pointless to learn.”

I can’t really comment on the intricacies of curriculum reform.

“A progressive pedagogical thinker could easily take your objection and say “Yes, yes! We need to force our students to know everything about MLK Jr’s life! Except the bad parts! They need to know about his whole career! His church! Where he grew up! The name of his first dog! Etc!” I’d much rather be in some joke High School social studies course where we have a few lazy weeks to learn about how great the civil rights movement was rather than a labor-intensive few weeks where we learn every detail about it. Why? Because the whole thing isn’t worth dedicating much of one’s time to, and most of the good heretical info won’t be there anyhow.”

I am highly skeptical of this happening. From this angle, demanding intense memorization is practically anathema to the typical progressive pedagogue because it inevitably reveals that some people are better at memorizing than others. Better to have everyone engaged in “critical thinking” which can’t be assessed objectively because “there’s no right answer!” A’s for effort all around.

I would say that constantly having to request your article be “interpreted charitably” given that it was rushed and done on a “cocktail of stimulants” does most of my work for me. People focus on the public speaking and leadership remark because it is an obvious failure in the original analysis, and a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the piece. The other obvious canary is talking about your own IQ score. And given your response to that was the nonsensical “Which courses on leadership and public speaking did Jesus Christ take?”, I assumed you were trolling, given the existence of a Jewish educational system explicitly mentioned in the New Testament. Your “Justice for Trayvon” follow-up confirmed it.

So no. I am flippant because your thoughts were shallow and ill-formed.

I assumed by Barkley 2012 you meant this paper:

Barkley, R. A. (2012). Executive Functioning and Self-Regulation: Extended Phenotype, Synthesis, and Clinical Implications

However, it’s only cited as a ‘projected publication’, so possibly google was not my friend as it has not been published.

Currently collaborating with 2 rather severe ADHD cases, the environmental scaffolding stuff might be very helpful.

In my view, “critical thinking” questions aren’t always bad. The real problem is that humanities and social science (especially history) classes desperately need curriculum reform. With unchallenging requirements, teachers find themselves having to ask “critical thinking” questions just to facilitate discussion and kill time. Plus, with the current curriculum for most schools, the bare facts are somewhat pointless to learn. A progressive pedagogical thinker could easily take your objection and say “Yes, yes! We need to force our students to know everything about MLK Jr’s life! Except the bad parts! They need to know about his whole career! His church! Where he grew up! The name of his first dog! Etc!” I’d much rather be in some joke High School social studies course where we have a few lazy weeks to learn about how great the civil rights movement was rather than a labor-intensive few weeks where we learn every detail about it. Why? Because the whole thing isn’t worth dedicating much of one’s time to, and most of the good heretical info won’t be there anyhow.

Now, I think “critical thinking” has such a stranglehold on pedagogy in college because the folks who represent the liberal arts want their field to remain as attractive as possible and thus increase more students. So they first get a stupid curriculum that students will be drawn to, then they make up stupid questions to conceal the fact that their class is pointless. If you take, let’s say, an average “major British authors” course in college and made the whole thing rote memorization, no one would want to take it. People study literature because they want to think about deep ideas. That’s a good thing; it’s one of the advantages of the humanities. But the difficulty of someone like Shakespeare forces you to familiarize yourself with a few historical details no matter what, and then you can start to pursue more info on your own time based on the line of inquiry you develop yourself. But the further you get into the modern era with literature and culture, the less context is needed, and loading up a class with stupid details about Toni Morrison’s life (or whatever) would be pointless. So instead, you get an optional Modern American Fiction class (rather than a required Shakespeare) with discussion questions like “Does slavery still haunt the US?” because the teacher was reading about Derrida’s writings on hauntology or whatever. My point is basically that content has a major relationship to pedagogical strategy.