20120627

Texas Universities must close

Huh?  What am I talking about?  I'm talking about the Texas GOP's recipe for complete irrelevance to the rest of the world.

It's fairly impressive, in an "attempting to return to third world living conditions in a generation" type of way.

But this part outright offends me:

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs...

Yes, critical thinking is a danger. We can't teach people to think for themselves.

This is the part where they attempt to reverse hundreds of years of evolution (oh wait, they think that's bupkiss, too) and progress. You cannot have a university run in that philosophy. Universities are all about teaching people critical thinking.

And if you want to stop funding universities (and here I'd like to make a small side point. For all the grief about ineffectiveness of schooling in the US, the US university system is second to none), you're definitely going to sink into irrelevance very quickly. You've just written yourselves out of the economy completely.

Twenty years of that sort of thinking, and the rest of us will be hoping that Rick Perry gets his wish, and Texas secedes. The response at that point would be, "Good riddance".

Hopefully, enough people are able to think for themselves enough to see that this is amazingly stupid.

(And note that I haven't touched on the suggestions for doing away with Affirmative Action and the Voter Rights Act of 1965. Because doing away with minority rights is the cornerstone of the stated purpose of this document, affirming that all men are created equal. Because nothing says "equal" like disenfranchisement.

Also not talking about banning gay marriage. Because, again, nothing says equal like, "You can't marry the person you love".)

This whole thing wouldn't really bother me if it was a manifesto by some virtually-unknown radical fringe group. But it's a freakin' major party in a major state. Is banning critical thought really mainstream? I sure as hell hope not.

No comments:

Post a Comment