Today’s educators denounce “rote memorization” as a skill.
It’s a required basis for the rest of learning. It’s part of the “grammar” stage of learning, on which being able to think logically and discuss logically.
Of course, those last two stages would be detrimental to the communist movement, so knock the foundations out before anyone gets started on that “logic” nonsense.
/johnny
Rote memorization...of your own name, birthday, address and phone number. No, we can’t have that.
There is a base of facts. Understanding, “what is a fact, what is not” is the core of what should be taught if one is teaching critical thinking.
That’s NOT what this teacher is talking about. To her - ‘critical thinking’ amounts to moral relativism, being taught to challenge the morals of their parents, church, etc. (but never to challenge the teacher or society that their ideas might be wrong). It is exactly as posted before that principles are stripped away to be replaced with questioning.
As recently as 45 years ago a small, Christian based, liberal arts college in Florida had an education program based on subject material expertise. If you were going to teach, lets say history, your major was history and you minored in education.
A decade later the priorities were changed - you majored in education and minored, if at all, in the subject you were going to teach.
The fallacy behind this theory was brought home in the mid-1990s when my children were in middle school and high school. I got into a minor contest with one of the teachers who claimed, because she had a degree in education, she could teach anything. Things got ugly when I asked her to teach me thermal dynamics inside a breeder reactor. It wasn’t much better when I asked to be taught Mandarin Chinese.
When she tried to hide behind I didn’t know what it meant to be a teacher I showed her my Florida State Teacher’s License to teach high school history.
Bottom - line: We, the tax payers, have bought into a false theory of education supported by college professors that have no outside, of the classroom, experience. And the ones that are paying for this worship of the false god “PhD” are our children.