The Thinking Teacher and FISA

As I listen to the President's ongoing protestations about Democratic attempts to "weaken" National Security, I realized we have a responsibility to ensure that our students don't succumb to Bush ideology which has disturbing parallels to propaganda that saw Hitler installed as Chancellor of Germany and the fall of it its democracy for nearly a half century. Am I ranting against conservative agenda in terms of National Security? If so, that is not my intent. I agree completely that government should be able to request wiretaps for suspected terrorists and their agents; What is so wrong with a secret court that is mandated to respond within 48 hours and empowered to grant retroactive wiretapping authority? The neocon aversion to any form of reasonable oversight is a transparent ploy to be able to act against unnamed enemies with impunity.

While carpooling this morning, a colleague raised an observation: What happens when, in five to ten years, new teachers were themselves educated under the auspices of NCLB? In our fanatic quest for universal mediocrity, will we create a generation of teachers who, themselves, lack the critical thinking skills to question important issues? If teachers become accomplices to enacting political-education objectives, who will be left to teach young people to question the motivations of those who are defining objectives? Students need to be taught more than facts; they need to be able to do more than perform skills in isolation: They need to be taught to question not only distant forms of authority (including the federal government), but also local forms present in the classroom including the text, the teacher, each other, and the omnipresent test.

If you teach critical thinking as part of your curriculum, what and how do you teach? How do students respond? Do you have any longitudinal data that shows how your students perform on standardized tests?