An Olive Branch

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 14:51:25 -0800, "Peter Duniho"
wrote:

"Corky Scott" wrote in message
.. .
What courses in school would teach critical thinking skills?

Any course can. That's one of the beautiful things about critical
thinking...it's relatively independent of the subject in question.

Can you give me an example of what you mean by critical thinking? How
would you see it being taught in, say, math class? Reading?

But when schools simply teach you that you have to memorize facts, but don't
need to know how to put facts together to create new knowledge and insights,
there's no real education going on. Unfortunately, that appears to be the
norm in education of all levels.

Well like it or not, there are some things kids just have to memorize.
The alphabet, spelling rules, vowel sounds, vocabulary, addition and
multiplication tables, and so on. These are building blocks for
further education.

Bush is a great believer in accountability in schools. How does he
assess accountability? By making schools give their students
standardized tests and telling them that if their students don't show
improvement, the school will loose funding. It's very important for
the schools that their students show improvement in these tests so the
inevitable result of "No child left behind" is rote memorization of
facts...

Corky Scott