Outlawing Critical Thinking

Sometimes, critical thinking is actually banned. In the past five years, a number of schools, districts, states, and even the federal government have enacted policies that seek to restrict critical analysis of historical and contemporary events in the school curriculum. In June 2006, the Florida Education Omnibus Bill included language specifying that, The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history…American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable.

Other provisions in the bill mandate “flag education, including proper flag display” and “flag salute” and require educators to stress the importance of free enterprise to the U.S. economy. But I am most concerned with the stated goal of the bill’s designers: "to raise historical literacy" with a particular emphasis on the “teaching of facts.” For example, the bill requires that only facts be taught when it comes to discussing the “period of discovery” and the early colonies. Florida is perhaps the first state to ban historical interpretation in public schools, thereby effectively outlawing critical thinking.

Of course, historians almost universally regard history as exactly a matter of interpretation; indeed, the competing interpretations are what make history so interesting. Historians and educators alike have widely derided the mandated adherence to an “official story” embodied in the Florida legislation. But the impact of such mandates should not be underestimated – especially because Florida is not alone.

The drive to engage schools in reinforcing a unilateral understanding of U.S. history and policy shows no sign of abating. More and more, teachers and students are seeing their schools or entire districts and states limiting their ability to explore multiple perspectives to controversial issues. Students and a drama teacher in a Connecticut high school spent months researching, writing, and rehearsing a play they wrote about the Iraq war titled “Voices in Conflict.” Before the scheduled performance, the school administration banned the play on the basis that it was “inappropriate.” (The students went on to perform the play last Spring on an off- Broadway stage in New York to impressive critical review). In Colorado, a student was suspended for posting flyers advertising a student protest. In Bay City, Michigan, wearing a T-shirt with an anti-war quotation by Albert Einstein was grounds for suspension.

The federal role in discouraging critical analysis of historical events has been significant as well. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Education announced a new set of history and civic education initiatives that the President said was designed to teach our children that “America is a force for good in the world, bringing hope and freedom to other people.” In 2004, Senator Lamar Alexander  (former U.S. secretary of education) warned that students should not be exposed to competing ideologies in historical texts but rather be instructed that our nation represents one true ideology. Alexander sponsored his American History and Civics Education Act to put civics back in its “rightful place in our schools, so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American.”

Presumably, for Alexander, what it means to be an American is more answer than question. I focus on history teaching here, but the trend is not limited to social studies. In many states, virtually every subject area is under scrutiny for any deviation from one single narrative, based on knowable, testable, and purportedly uncontested facts. An English teacher in a recent study undertaken by colleagues and myself told us that even novel reading was now prescriptive in her state’s rubric: meanings predetermined, vocabulary words preselected, and essay topics predigested. A science teacher put it this way: “The only part of the science curriculum now being critically analyzed is evolution.” The high stakes testing mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has further pushed to the margins education efforts that challenge students to grapple with tough questions about society and the world.

In a recent study by the Center on Education Policy, 71 percent of districts reported cutting back time for other subjects – social studies in particular – to make more space for reading and math instruction. Last June, historian David McCullough told a U.S. Senate committee that because of NCLB, “history is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove altogether in many or most schools.” An increasing number of students are getting little to no education about how government works, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the evolution of social movements, and U.S. and world history. As Peter Campbell, Missouri State Coordinator for Fair Test, noted, the sociopolitical implications of poor black and Hispanic children not learning about the Civil Rights movement, not learning about women’s suffrage, not learning about the U.S. Civil War, and not learning about any historical or contemporary instance of civil disobedience is more than just chilling. It smacks of an Orwellian attempt not merely to rewrite history, but to get rid of it.

The implications Campbell describes are not limited to poor black and Hispanic students. Any student being denied knowledge about historical events and social movements misses out on important opportunities to link his or her education to the quintessentially democratic struggles for a better society for all. You might be thinking at this point that conditions might be bad for students unlucky enough to be in the public schools, but that, on the whole, many independent schools prepare students for a democratic society by offering a broad liberal education that asks students to grapple with difficult and contested policy issues. Evidence indicates otherwise. As the goals for K-12 public education have shifted away from preparing active and engaged public citizens and towards more narrow goals of career preparation and individual economic gain, independent schools have in many ways led the pack.

Pressures from parents, board members, and a broad cultural shift in educational priorities have resulted in schools across the country being seen primarily as conduits for individual success, and lessons aimed at exploring democratic responsibilities have increasingly been crowded out. A steadily growing body of research in the United States now echoes what former director of the UK’s Independent Schools Inspectorate stated most plainly after reviewing data from an extensive study of British independent schools: because of the immense pressure to achieve high academic results on exams and elevate prestigious college entrance rates, independent schools are “over-directed” so that students do not have “sufficient opportunity or incentive to think for themselves.” Increasingly following formulas that “spoon-feed” students to succeed on narrow academic tests, Independent schools, Hubbard warned, “teach students not to think.”

Current school reform policies and many classroom practices too often reduce teaching and learning to exactly the kind of mindless rule-following that makes students unable to make principled stands that have long been associated with American democracy. The hidden curriculum of post-NCLB classrooms is how to please authority and pass the tests, not how to develop convictions and stand up for them.