The GOP put out a platform that opposes abortion, multicultural education, and critical thinking. The platform supports spanking in schools, and sex education so long as it’s restricted to abstinence.
Here’s the part about critical thinking:
We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning)…
They say that critical thinking insert was a regrettable accident, but you can read the Texas Republican 2012 platform right here — 2012Platform_Final — which includes:
Homosexuality — We affirm that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God.
Was that accidental, too? And thanks, Crystal, for the link.
Dating Jesus 
Really? “Unchanging truths”? I suppose I should be grateful that my single, working mother didn’t sell me to the first taker for a couple of goats and a sack of flour.
Oh, c’mon, Sharon. You’d bring in at least three sacks of flour…
Reads like a manifesto that could have been written by the Central Education Politburo of the Soviet Union. Texas Republicans seem to have a lot in common with Stalin and Khrushchev than Eisenhower.
WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
I’m actually stunned at some of the language — and I’m not easily stunned.
It is the “embodiment of the conservative dream in America.”
God. Capitalism. The Free Market.
In that order.
Tangentially: we so often hear “It’s my/our child/children, and I/we will educate/feed/clothe/care for him/her/them as I/we see fit!” As if by bringing a child into the world a parent has a new possession, rather than another human being who’s going to have to make her/his way in the larger world, facing its challenges.
Lack of critical thinking skills plus “all the education you can afford” minus gay workforce equals economic turnaround. Who says Americans can’t do math?
We need George Carlin to come back and do some Public Service spots. One thing that defeats bad ideas is using bulls eye humor to ridicule them.
Yeah, we don’t want to teach critical thinking because it will cause people to question the ridiculous beliefs we got them to swallow with the Kool-Aid.
I’m reading Gail Collins’ new book, “As Texas Goes…: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda.” She connects the dots from privatization and deregulation movements that start in Texas and infect the rest of the country–there was the S&L crisis, banking deregulation (anyone remember Phil & Wendy Gramm?), speculation in energy futures, just to name a few non-education-related areas. (Remember rolling blackouts in California and spectacular profits for Enron? Remember “Kenny Boy” Lay?) But Texans really have outdone themselves in education “reform.” As recently as 20 years ago, Texas legislators were still debating the importance of a high school diploma. Even Barbara Bush the elder took time from her summer in Kennebunkport to write to the Houston newspaper to decry the near-last-place finish of Texas in things like high school graduation rates and SAT scores. Now, you might be thinking that this would be a call to arms. What it was was a call to transfer as much as possible of the state’s aid to education to private pockets in the form of charter schools with no desks or books, tutoring that made no discernible effect on test scores, and more and more tests, all designed, administered, and scored by private companies. Even the Bush family took a cut in the form of Jeb’s “educational software” company. (“Thanks for the free advertising, Mom!”) We can thank Texas for the No Child Left Behind law, taking more and more classroom time to “”teach to the test,” and less to actual teaching, ineffectual charter schools, the denigration of teachers and teachers’ unions, and, last but not least, the watering down of first biology and now social science and history to fit the evangelical Texas School Board’s idea of what reality *should* be, not what it really is.
I went to school in Texas for 12 years, and I thought I got a decent education. I was one of the lucky ones, I guess, but those years were pre-Karl Rove, thank goodness.
Gotta read that book…my list is growing.
It’s a fast read.
Utterly disturbed. Spanking in schools is illegal under your constitution – no “cruel and unusual punishment” or torture. Let’s keep school spankings in sexual fantasies. And let’s keep God in church not in politics. Anyway how do they know straight people aren’t tearing at the fabric of society and what’s their preoccupation with a ‘family unit’?? A family can be big, small, blended, mixed race, polyamorous, open relationship, single parent, three-generational, young parents, older parents…they are obssessed with family yet they mean NUCLEAR familyand support CHILD ABUSE! The only State involvment/concern with the family should be preventing child abuse and neglect, yet they want child abuse not only within the family but at school!