The War For America is Through Our Heart & Mind – #criticalthinkers #education #technology #theFreedomPapers
- How and why can the practice of critical thinking and public speaking instruction turn the tables on the quality of men and women we are producing in America?
- Is it not evident that inner city public school systems in the United States skew towards racial segregation?
- Are we looking to increase and maintain local and national economy, or should we be interested in developing objective, critical thinkers who are also professionals?
- Does the singular focus on teaching science, technology, math, and engineering in the American public school system create a professional labor force of followers?
The valuing and shaping of individuals who employ critical thinking as an academic focus equal to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics may never happen in America. It would be downright dangerous to the established political power order to have citizens de-tribalizing from the current culture system ‘modus operandi’ and becoming a nation of free-thinkers. If you notice, no politician or media organization, themselves ‘tribalist critical thinkers,’ would see it fitting to support an educational empowerment construct that could directly release individuals from tribal loyalty to ideology, political perspective, or self-identification as pertaining resolutely to a binary mode of thinking. Hence, we shall not hear it valued in inner city public school classrooms, predominantly teaching ethnic minorities, nor will the subject be broached as an educational goal which would refresh the founding principles of the American democracy.
Instead, what we hear is the steady drone of creating professionals who are focused on their work, rather than renaissance professionals who work, yet also are powerful participators of democracy. The default present condition is that individuals who are higher on the social-economic ladder reap the benefits from access to quality educational institutions aware of the importance of uploading and refining critical thinking skills into their students. Surely, exceptions can be found. Parents who promote family discussion at meal time strengthen their children's critical thought and social-relational skills, and this supplements the educational endowment received at school. Former slave and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass realized that the African-American slave was being kept devoid of critical thinking by being deprived of the ability to read and write. Due to this, African slaves were successfully kept in bondage for four hundred years in America. More so, upon his self-empowerment to read and write, he found that perspective of thought and character-building was instrumental in delineating his purpose in life. It was the intellectually empowered Douglass, whom through consistent public speaking and ownership of a form of historical production, a printing press, was able to positively disrupt the established political power order simply with words that reached hearts and minds. His ability to speak and write eloquently and persuasively coupled with the printing press and distribution network he created, effectively changed the national conversation. I would add that God was with him because of his alignment to God’s Word, but that could be argued as subjective. Even so, critical thinking matters.
To what end is the education of the people in the school systems across the nation?
We must stop and consider. We must have this conversation. And we will have to have it in spite of the content information, the very conversations main stream news media outlets choose for us. In other words, we start like Frederick Douglass started, without help, without support, without the mega-phones of the established news media and social media organizations. We start the conversation as the beginning of an alternate culture that does not push an ideology, but seeks to develop free thinkers who are objective and non-tribal. The odds are wholly against such a conversation picking up momentum given that the result of having masses of awakened citizens would change the political and social economic order in America, or any society for that matter. We need to create professionals who are leaders, not professionals who are followers. It is a mindset and it is a set of skills. The rise of artificial intelligence technology that can ‘reason, analyze, and choose,’ as Thomas Friedman puts it in his op-ed essay for June 27, 2018 in the New York Times (page A23), directly challenges an individual’s ability to think critically. Such algorithmic technology will ultimately curate and prioritize information according to the ideologies of the agent-creators of such technologies. That is to say, the menu options of information-content that is presented to us is pre-picked for us, ultimately sidelining organic choice and rerouting our likes and dislikes into options and choices made for us according to the reasoning of the agent-creators, like Google.
In such a paradigm, individual human reasoning of an entire country becomes a slave to the human reasoning of an elite few that plans out critical thinking algorithmic computation. In such a ‘matrix,’ human critical thinking becomes subservient and the vision of a few becomes and is, the vision of hundreds of millions of people. This is how the American democracy of our founding fathers is brought down to the ground quietly.
As the American flag billows in the wind and we pay our respect to all who have fought, to all who currently protect and serve our country, consider the reality of what has happened, consider the challenge to each individual, consider the duty to raise the intellectual rigor of our children as critical thinkers who are passionate enough to not run, but take a stand to start the conversation of what America we want to have as responsible sovereign citizens equal to each other with inalienable, God-given rights. Their is no other country in the world like ours. We have gotten this far because of the founding principles we have polished and upheld. Frederick Douglass, the critical thinker, the patriot, the All-American man of God, found that we were not living up to the universal human right ideals and he took a stand. He endured the ravages of slavery, intellectual deprivation, mockery, defaming, financial destitution and cultural isolation to get his point across. In doing so, I posit that he moved hearts and minds to wake up and lead, not as his followers, but as brothers and sisters walking shoulder to shoulder as leaders.
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