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Anti-Thinking Skills in School
by Glenn Woiceshyn
Re: "How You Teach Them to Think for Themselves"--by
Virginia Galt--Sept.16, 1997--The Globe and Mail
Dear Editor,
Contrary to Virginia Galt's claim that history professor Tim Brook was teaching "critical
thinking skills" to Grade 7 and 8 students, he was in fact encouraging them
to be pathological skeptics and valueless relativists.
If, according to Prof. Brook, "truth is an impossible exercise," then
why study history or anything at all? Why not sit back passively and wait for some
dictator (or Fuhrer) with "mystical insight" to appear and tell us what
to think and whom to kill?
If, according to Prof. Brook, Columbus's 1492 voyage cannot be evaluated as heroic
or even positive because those with other "perspectives" would disagree,
then we should reject values as purely subjective, as divorced from reason and life.
Prof. Brook is espousing cultural relativism--the notion that all cultures are equally
good (or bad); that there are no objective standards by which to evaluate one better
than another; that it's all relative and subjective. Under this toxic nonsense, a
tribe of cannibals (or a nation of Nazis) is no worse than a civilized country that
embraces reason, science, technology and individual rights.
How about exercising some real "crap detection" in your Middle Kingdom
column?--so that parents can protect their children from such mind destroyers.
Sincerely,
Glenn Woiceshyn
© 1997 Glenn Woiceshyn. All rights reserved.
This article can be found on-line at at http://www.capitalism.org/glennw. |
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