If you read the article it actually says they could have argued against.
I understand critical thinking, but not much went into picking the subject.
Agenda or egregious mistake?
How did this get into “Common Core”? I see it blamed with no explanation.
The writings of Joseph Goebbels have probably some of the best arguments for exterminating the Jews. Your read them at your peril, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend them for high school students and now college students often lack the necessary mental durability. They are useful though for juxtaposing against arguments of someone like Peter Singer as he discussed the implementation of Obamacare.
Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer recently presented in the New York Times Congressional intent without equivocation. “Rationing health care means getting value for the billions spent by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse….There’s no doubt that it’s tough – politically, emotionally, and ethically - to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way….The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for resources they have been allocated….If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving that life gains 70 years, whereas a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will gain only 5 life-years. That suggests saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds”.
Notice Congress and the President are not mentioned.
Common Core absolutely should be abolished but not necessarily for this assignment as critical thinking is an important skill that needs to be developed.
As a teen, I was visiting a friend and there was a number of other kids in the house. someone picked up a book on Adolf Hitler that was laying around and one of the girls said, “Oh, I don’t like him.”
I wanted to respond to that statement but was unable to adequately verbalize my thoughts. These many decades later, I’ve learned a great deal and gained in understanding of the human condition as well as matured in my ability to convey to others my perspective; yet, I still can’t fully explain my frustration at that young woman’s words.
Liking or not liking Hitler is irrelevant. We don’t seek to understand Nazi ideology because we agree with it or are sympathetic to its goals; we do it to prepare ourselves to recognize the next resurgence of that thinking, to be able to identify it before it becomes a threat; ignoring it puts civilization itself in peril.
While “Reductio ad Hitlerum” is sort of a running gag around here, the fact is there really are people within our society who think like Nazis. BLM and Antifas are very quick to shout “Hitler!” at anyone they disagree with but, ironically, they are the latest carriers of the amoral pernicious philosophy the Nazis harbored which assured them their cause was so sublimely just, they were immune from the constraints of decency.
If the students pretended they were part of a cult that wanted to kill all teachers that would teach “critical thinking” skills as well—and I doubt many teachers would be pleased with such an assignment.
Case closed!