no hots for teacher
Music: The Invisibles: Rispah (2012)
A number of friends have poked me, mostly virtually, over the official platform adopted recently by the Texas Republican Party. The 2012 platform (which you can find in its entirety here) has a statement listed under "Knowledge-Based Education" that reads as follows:
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.
This is a rather baffling statement, insofar as "HOTS" refers to Bloom's Taxonomy, an elegant and highly influential model for thinking about education and curricula that was developed in the late 1940s and 1950s. Named somewhat erroneously after the editor of the book that advanced the taxonomy (which was, in turn, developed by a group of folks meeting at conferences over many years), the scheme identifies education as addressing cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains (all three are addressed in the very early grades, for example, where hand-eye coordination and sharing crayons is just as important as counting). The RePube platform addresses the more cognitively complex levels of the "cognitive" domain, which consists of the following: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The last three, "analysis, synthesis, and evaluation"---derived from that Mac-Daddy of thought, Plato---are the so-called "higher order thinking skills" that the Texas politicians seem to oppose.
Of course, my job description is to teach precisely these skills: I am to get students to break things down into their many parts, put them back together to see how they work, and then assess the whole shebang. For example: what are the elements of this movie? what are its constituent parts? Can you reassemble these parts into alternative plots and narratives? If so, how would it change the meaning? The impact on the senses? What do you think of that? These are basic questions critical thinking is designed to inspire. Why a political party would oppose this as somehow counter to their interests is strange.
Of course, the sign something is amiss is the parenthetical "values clarification," which apparently has something do to with higher order thinking skills. Prima facie, it simply appears that whomever penned this particular sentence was referring to some priming document that suggests that the teaching of higher order thinking is actually a calibration of values. Contacted by numerous folks, the TRP responded that the wording of the platform was in error. “I think the intent is that the Republican Party is opposed to the values clarification method that serves the purpose of challenging students beliefs and undermine parental authority," said a spokesman.
The clarification, of course, only makes it worse. Alongside the plank, the clarification only amplifies the battle cry of the newest battle of the Republican-sponsored culture wars: pedagogy itself is ideologically suspect. That is to say, even Bloom's Taxonomy is a disguised, "liberal" ideology . . . . This is akin to saying something like higher fuel-economy vehicles like the Ford Focus or Prius or whatever are responsible for higher gas prices. Oh, dudes: who would want to identify themselves with a political party that promotes stupidity? Yikes this is bad.
I've said it many times here and elsewhere, but, these folks are determined to politicize educational policy. At first blush I thought it was insane that a political party would oppose the teaching of critical thinking. But in their clarification of "intent," I see it's precisely that. And "they" hold up signs accusing Obama of "socialism." As Orwell might observe: socialism is neoliberalism; conservatism is fascism; doubleplusgood.