Guest Voice: “Oh Please, Mr. TV… Tell Me What to Think”
The Moderate Voice sometimes runs Guest Voice columns by readers or writers. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect by the opinion of TMV or its cobloggers.
“Oh Please, Mr. TV… Tell Me What to Think”
By Matt Pearl
A few posts ago, I talked about the differences between Fox News’ and CNN’s prime time lineups, namely that Fox’s was full of opinion shows and CNN’s was full of investigative news magazines. I was thinking that this was just a difference in what liberals and conservatives tend to want to watch, but recently, a conversation that I had about education with one of my friends got me thinking about a different possible cause…
This completely zeros in on my problem with the education system in this country.
That problem is, simply, that we are not teaching our kids how to think.
Before I went to college, I had very little knowledge of logic or critical thinking… and I think that that is a problem. I didn’t touch a logic textbook until my first semester of college. I wasn’t able to effectively form or diagram arguments, and I didn’t grasp the concept of what a fallacy actually was. The result, however, was that my opinions were rough and sophomoric, my papers didn’t quite work, and I wasn’t that quick on my feet when it came to thinking or arguing.
Now, two years and three Philosophy courses later, I feel that I am much better at those very things. Now, something that is even better, in my opinion, I don’t trust it when people try to press their opinions on to me. I realize that the factual basis of premises is only part of a well-constructed argument, and I realize that people can use truth to lie.
What is my point? Not everyone goes, or should go, to college, but everyone should know how to think critically of what they hear.
The fact that we don’t receive that training in primary or secondary schooling is a travesty. I’m not advocating teaching complex, symbolic logic to fifth graders… Every high school graduate should know how to correctly construct and diagram an argument; every 9th grader should know what an /ad hominem/ attack or an argument from ignorance is and why they shouldn’t be making them. It is imperative that we teach students how to think critically.
However, not everyone wants to teach students these things. Just like with pin heads who don’t want to teach their children evolution, some parents are so worried of actually having to be parents that they don’t want their children to question what they do or why they do it. Wondering why is one thing that parents don’t want their children to do, because it might mean that they don’t know the answer. Some people don’t want their children to wonder why they go to church or why God is all powerful… Parents can’t answer those questions, and they are afraid that ignorance will be perceived as weakness or impiety, and we can’t have weak, impious parents…
So, that is one possible explanation for Fox having all opinion shows on during their prime time slots. We have an entire legion of buffoons who don’t know how to think for themselves. They need the television to tell them their opinions, to tell them what is right and what is wrong. These people can’t make their own opinions because they lack the tools that are necessary: rational, critical thought.
Matt Pearl, is a Economics and Political Science student at the University of Georgia… He has written several Guest Voice columns.
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18 Responses to “Guest Voice: “Oh Please, Mr. TV… Tell Me What to Think””
[...] 24th, 2007 by mvdg Matt Pearl wrote a good and interesting guest post for The Moderate Voice about a major flaw in the American educational system: students are only [...]
The contrast that Mr. Pearl points out between how different individuals seek understanding finds a nuanced and powerful representation in the “Perry Scheme of Intellectual and Ethical Development†(you can google that phrase to find a few good .edu domain websites that introduce it.) The scheme has provided me with some of my most profound understanding of why some people behave and think as they do. I wish every teacher in this country were required to have at least some familiarity with it.
The bad news is the very low level at which most people typically operate on the scheme, and the worse news is how little effect most of our educational system (Kindergarten – College) has in moving people to higher levels in the hierarchical scheme.
I have been wondering for some time now whether the PSoIED could explain a lot about what has been going so wrong with our political system. Incidentally – and I think this is what originally motivated me to compose this comment – it has also occurred to me that it provides a very reasonable context for understanding how such divergent opinions could arise on whether blogging for opinion and news is likely to have a positive or negative impact. Can you look at the scheme and figure out where someone is operating when they maintain that opinions and news should only come from the professionals? Can you tell at what level someone is operating when they respond positively to an authoritarian?
To claim that Larry King, Lou Dobbs, and Warner Wolf are investigative shows is laughable. If you just look at what CNN has done with CNN headline during prime time, you can see that CNN is also leaning more to opinion.
I agree that a large number of people have no wish to go through the work of reading and informing themselves and, god forbid, thinking, to form opinions. It’s much more comfortable to just allow opinions to be given to you. What I don’t agree with so much is that this is the exclusive realm of the conservative public, in the least. I lived in what might well be the most rabidly liberal school district in the nation, and there they valued that you “learn to think for yourself”….as long as you thought liberal. It was no less dogmatic, I’m sure, than any conservative school, just that the positions were reversed.
I think that at most the division could roughly be made between the educated and engaged and the uneducated and uninterested. There are people who LIKE to know things, both conservative and liberal, like to snoop around wikipedia when they hear a term they don’t know, who watch more than one TV news program and have actually read whole articles, not just highlights given to them in their blogs. They may agree more with a conservative side or a liberal side, but have usually made at least some effort to construct their own justifications. On the other side there are people who can’t be bothered, who AT THE MOST listen to and regurgitate their favourite talking points. I say at the most because outside this comparison is a huge mass of people who don’t watch ANY news that isn’t gossip/sports related and whose political opinions, when they have them, are gotten only from social osmosis from the people who have surrounded them from childhood on up.
j@ne futzinfarb, can you tell what level journalists are operating on when they present the evolution vs. creation debate in such a way that gives both the same amount of authority by virtue of having an opinion?
I read the summary, it’s interesting, but I’d like it better if it weren’t so student oriented. Being that I have a stack of work-related papers to read now I unfortunately won’t be able to read the original paper at present. It would be interesting to see how stages break down amongst the science or humanities oriented. In the wider population it would be good to see how they break down at different educational, economic, religious and other levels.
Matt,
I agree strongly with your premise that our education system is sorely lacking in the area of critical thinking, but I feel that you are also falling prey to a logical fallacy in your post: the fallacy of the consequent. You’ve presented a hypothesis about why our students aren’t being taught critical thinking during primary and secondary education, and you’ve presented as evidence a different phenomenon (that of parents who resist efforts to introduce rational thought into faith education) which doesn’t really support your hypothesis. It’s closely enough related that some readers may see that as evidence, but it’s really a separate issue. Parents rightly want public schools to refrain from asking students to question the tenets of their religious faith; rightly or wrongly, for some people this intersects with scientific discussions of evolution. Most of us would agree that such parents should not be allowed to introduce creationism as an alternative theory to evolution, and we can most likely agree with your thoughts on why such parents wish to keep their children from questioning the dogmatic aspects of their faith, but this is a completely separate issue from the concern about absence of logic in the curriculum in general.
In reality, I’d say that since most adults have not been taught about critical thinking, the absence of this skill in public education stems from people not knowing what they don’t know. Likewise, the tendency for media groups to offer opinion journalism and the tendency for large groups of the public to be engaged by it stems from this lack of realization. I highly doubt your premise though, that the absence of education about this skill stems from any kind of opposition to questioning on faith issues.
And I have to agree with superdestroyer, that those CNN shows are not qualitatively superior to (or more objective than) the Fox shows, they’re just misleading in a different way. There are many ways to propagandize and pander; I think your initial premise was probably more accurate about the different receptiveness of conservative and liberal audiences. The liberal side tends more toward a “watchdog” role for the media, and investigative journalism which purports to expose the excesses or impropriety of the system are popular. On the conservative side, Fox has tapped into the popular conservative belief that the media itself needs a watchdog, so their reporting has a bias toward the establishment and attempts to show how the “liberal MSM” distorts.
Thats a mighty wide swath you cut there fella. And on a post about critical thinking no less. An entire legion of people that don’t know what is right or wrong because they don’t watch the right news channel? I watch Lou dobbs a couple times a week and he ends every peice he does with, thats right, his opinion.
Frankly, its hard to give credence to a post on critical thinking when the author describes those who have a different view than him as buffoons and pinheads.
Although CNN is a totally invalid exemplar for it,
I strongly agree with the observation that critical thinking is sadly missing in education. That very likely is due to it being missing among teachers, as well. Teachers can successfully pass through all the levels of education to earn the necessary credentials without encountering this concept at all.
When you get right down it, the public has become so used to doing without critical thinking, that they quite enjoy the unchallenged world of being spoon fed opinions. Many parents actually fear the exposure of their children to anything other than a carbon copy of their own opinions.
Any effort to introduce critical thinking in school will often be underminced by parents who are scared of the very idea.
The children, our future public, lose.
To me a better example than FOX/CNN would be talk radio. I read a nice piece once about how some people tend to have personalities that respond really well to authoritarian leadership and a lack of critical thinking skills seemed to go hand in hand with it. Another aspect was repetition of beliefs as things in and of themselves without needing a foundation. Again, why I think talk radio goes very strongly with the conservative religon crowd and less so with intellectuals.
Overall I’d have to agree with the article, but I don’t think there is any parent organized opposition to critical thinking in classrooms. At least I have never heard of it. We should have it though. Right after civics and economics.
Sam.
Critical thinking can be a part of every lesson; It needn’t be a set formula or lesson plan, as suggested in some comments here. It’s an attitude containing some scepticism, some attention to comparisons and contradictions and logical deductions – the opposite to gullibility.
Many parents who may not have objections to critical thinking in the abstract, do object when crtitical thinking challenges their own viiews.
It’s not as if there would be a ‘parents against crtical thinking’ group. The objection would be raised against a specific topic or idea emerging in the process of applied critical thinking. one which contradicts the parents’ opinions.
Other than issues that touch on religious or moral beliefs, when do parents ever object to this kind of skill being taught? If a proposed curriculum included a social studies class where kids analyzed various news articles for bias, or a science class where kids were taught to critique the design of a published scientific study, do you really believe that parents would object?
To repeat my earlier observation, I think that this skill is often neglected simply because many adults aren’t sufficiently aware of the need for it. I think it has little to do with fear or a desire to teach kids to think dogmatically.
If you read what is happening in some school districts, when children examinine newspapers for bias, for example, parents become unhappy if the ‘right’ sort of bias isn’t discovered.
Reading newspaper accounts critically about the Iraq war in the early years was very controversial. It is becoming controversial again, in the opposite direction.
Do you have any links to specific examples of this?
Generally when teaching students, the material ought not to be the most controversial issues of our times unless the teacher bends over backward to not present his or her own biases. Parents are right to be wary about that, but if you truly know of cases where the assignments were NOT skewed but really had the students critically examining facts or critiquing opinions on both sides of the spectrum then I’m open to seeing such examples.
CS-
Current Events is a regular class period in all of the schools I’m familiar with. Naturally, this involves reading newspapers and magazines, and children bring in articles of their own choosing.
Discussion provides an excellent opportunity to practice critical thinking, except that current events turn out ot be controversial. quite often.
A teacher friend (6th grade) discontinued using political stories for discussion because 2 parents wanted to make sure the ‘wrong’ stories would not be discussed.
In the school my granddaughter attends, there was an uproar among parents when a child brought in a clipping about a homeless man being set on fire = too violent.
I am not claiming that this is what happens as a rule.
It’s just that teachers need to walk on eggs quite a lot.
There was quite an uproar among parents of my granddaughter’s 3rd grade, when a child brought in as story about a homeless man set on fire by teenagers. The teacher handled it very well, but one mother, serving as a techer’s aide, objected to the violence in the story, and she riled up others.
None of the children were upset until after the mothers made an issue of it. The whispering among children went on for the rest of the year
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Please ignore the last paragraph above, something I meant to delete.
Lefty versus often righty
[talk radio's appeal]
It also may be how good a conversationalist the host is, or how his or her diction is appealing, or how entertaining (since it usually is a monologue!).
That would be true for any show; the size of talk radio (which is nothing new now; some hosts are passe’ if anything now) was due originally to the still-extant problem of liberal bias and “agenda” or “crusader” “journalism” in the “mainstream” media. (That is more important than the schlocky and tabloidish nature of modern maintream media; in fact FOX, not as liberal by far, is notoriously tacky.)
Sometimes radio voices simply are good, or are better than what you would hear (and endure) on television, so for example, you might want to view a TV broadcast of a sports game but turn off the TV sound and instead listen to a local play-by-play radio announcer.
Cheer up. They’ll sometimes take time off from watching teevee to make YouTube videos to send to their Democratic candidates to help them choose who they’ll vote for in 2008.