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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:33AM
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
The New Yorker wonders:
My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can't escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there's a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, "an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools," I gave a little fist pump in the air.
Cursive and handwriting are dead. Communication of the future will be done with pure emoticons.
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:56PM
If you read Twain with any depth, you should learn to see through cons, shams, and fluffed up business cases. It's all there.
Naturally, this is discouraged because we can't have kids learning to distrust commercials and politicians. Next thing you know they'd be comparison shopping and forming unions!
But yes, I would be in favor of teaching more critical thinking skills. At one time, literature and mathematics were meant to form a foundation for teaching critical thinking (consider how much crap a good application of logic can dispel). The problem is that the application to critical thinking went by the wayside. This is because modern schools were (and still are) geared to producing good factory workers who knew enough to be useful but not enough to demand a better deal or become competition.
But schools are hardly the sole problem there. Consider how many institutions people have been told they can trust for so long who have lead everyone down the path. Respectable business leaders? Don't make me laugh, they have an army of lawyers to help them know how far they can dip into the illegal side without getting caught. Police? Yeah, sure. Parents are now advising their kids to avoid the police, especially if they get lost. Doctors? Those masters of turning a hangnail into a $3000 ordeal? Are you kidding?!?
We routinely look the other way when groups of 6 to 12 doctors of psychology gang up on toddlers to deceive them. We call it advertising.
If schools start teaching critical thinking, we'll have to bring the hammer down on all of them.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:57PM
If you read Twain with any depth, you should learn to see through cons, shams, and fluffed up business cases. It's all there.
At one time, literature and mathematics were meant to form a foundation for teaching critical thinking (consider how much crap a good application of logic can dispel).
That's like saying a bunch of movies and videos containing sections with somewhat realistic fighting in them can teach people to fight. Might work for some people, but not most people. Most people would need many actual sessions with instructors and sparring partners to learn to fight well.
Perhaps some people can learn to see through cons and shams after reading "The Little Red Riding hood" or "Twain" in depth. But most people don't.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 03 2016, @02:30PM
That's because for fighting, you have to train the cerebellum, not the intellect.
But note that I said literature and mathematics form a FOUNDATION for learning critical thinking. That is, they are prerequisite courses. The class that would bring it together by guiding students through the process and practicing is not taught.