Texas GOP Declares: "No More Teaching of 'Critical Thinking Skills' in Texas Public Schools" Textbooks, which are assigned and shared, in a classroom at Hutto High School in Hutto, Texas, April 5, 2012.
(Photo: Ben Sklar / The New York Times)The Republican Party of Texas has issued their 2012 political platform and has come out and blatantly opposed critical thinking in public schools throughout the state. If you wonder what took them so long to actually state that publicly, it is really a matter of timing. With irrationality now the norm and an election hovering over the 2012 horizon, the timing of the Republican GOP announcement against "critical thinking" instruction couldn't be better. It helps gin up their anti-intellectual base. Fear and Loathing in Fundamentalist Land. As a life-long Republican and an evangelical minister, I have been appalled at the attitudes and actions of so many Christian Republicans.
There has been the (still alive) birther movement, continued belief that President Obama is a Muslim, charges that he is a not-so-secret communist, and support for a documented Republican leadership strategy to oppose every proposal that Obama made the last four years no matter its merit or the damage this strategy can bring to our country’s recovery. Add to this, an uncritical acceptance of money and ideas by billionaire businessmen who quite cynically say what conservatives want to hear in order to benefit their own corporate bottom line, and we have a situation far worse than when the Moral Majority got co-opted by the political right back in the 1980’s. At first, I was reluctant to believe that race and prejudice had much to do with the opposition to Obama.
But I have changed my mind, sadly. What the Right Gets Right. With the competitors for the Republican presidential nomination engaged in an intriguing and unexpected debate over the dangers of capitalism’s “creative destruction,” this is the appropriate moment to explore the question: What does the right get right?
What insights, principles, and analyses does this movement have to offer that liberals and Democrats might want to take into account? I recently posed a question to conservative think tanks: If given a free hand, how would conservatives deal with the unemployed, those dependent on government benefits (food stamps, Medicaid), and, more generally, those who are losers in the new economy — those hurt by corporate restructuring, globalization and declining manufacturing employment? A conservative policy intellectual from a different think tank sent me an email suggesting that I read Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, “The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise.” “They appreciate more instinctively the need for fiscal balance.”