Has Public Education in the United States become a lackluster, assembly line approach in producing free and critical thinkers in our citizenry?
For one, we must look to history. Often times I'm presented with the notion that the "good ole days" were, well...good. As far as public education is concerned we have seen literacy rates rise since the institution of the Federal Department of Education. But does literacy encompass, or give rise to, the capacity of critical thinking? I believe it does. With the learned ability to read and write, more and more people were given the means to explore the written word which is the primary tool by which information is transmitted (aside from word of mouth which is not a reliable means of transmitting information from the original source).
By "the good ole days" I refer to times past before there was a public education system mandated by the federal government. This would embody an education system that had taken place before ca. 1870 (shortly after the American Civil War). Can anybody imagine reverting back to this time period? The "good ole days"? Literacy rates went from 80% in 1870 to 99.4% by 1976.
I'm sorry but I'll pass on "the good ole days". When blacks and women did not have the right to vote. When blacks and other minorities were 20.1% literate in 1870 as opposed to the 88.5% literacy of whites in the same year the data was collected. What does this say about the culture and society of those times?
Well, were people more freethinking and thinking critically in those days? It's relative. I'm sure that a miniscule minority did indeed get the education to assume such faculty; but we are talking about a minority population that was literate as represented in the statistics of literacy rates I've sited above. And these individuals were white male men and I assume no one will be willing to argue that assertion.
Again, I must come back to the issue of literacy and it's relevance to critical thought. Is there a correlation? During our medieval past (in the Western world), when literacy was at an all time low amongst the general populace, we had people believing in some outlandish ideas before science and the Scientific Method rolled around and threw every bodies notion of reality out the window. The Earth was not flat and not the center of the cosmos as expressed by Copernicus. Newton's Theory of Gravity, one basis of physics, eventually gave rise to Einsteins Theory of Relativity. Without having the written word of those individuals past we would not have the progress by which the next future generation building on the foundation on previous generations. Without the written word, and the ability to discern it, we are doomed to a stagnant state of hearsay and grapevine theoretic. Hence, I must say that literacy does correlate with free and critical thought. To enable people to read the thoughts and ideas gone before and to extrapolate and improve those thoughts and ideas by virtue of having the original piece of literature before them to ponder.
Now, is every individual in society naturally capable of free, critical and ponderous thought? No.
Nor should they be obligated to. Nor should they be derided or "pushed" to do so. When people begin to decry our system of education as inadequate in not producing "qualified" individuals to go on to become productive and critically thinking citizens I must cry foul. Because we are all individual. We can't all attain such status as Poet Laureates or Nobel Prize winners or even minimally, freethinking citizens. This is not the fault of our system of education...it is the "fault" of human beings.
Another topic which comes up is that our current system of education was fashioned or designed in such a way as to produce automatons. I digress in saying that I must postulate that this may have been true in times past and quite possibly true today but that (optimistically) we are moving, or progressing, toward a world in which our citizenry have the tools to better be informed and make decisions concerning their lives that have not been available to them in the past. To those who believe that our education system was designed to produce automatons...I wish there was a time-travel machine for you to take a trek back and see all the horrible things of our past.
In essence I am saying that the whole of our human, earthly existence is getting better, no matter the naysayers or doom mongers speculations.
