Freeman: Real education stresses development of the analytic and critical thinking skills of students

By Samuel Freeman

Dr. M. Ray Perryman, thank you for your Rio Grande Guardian article on changes in years of education over the past ten-plus years.

Unfortunately, how many years a person spends in school, or how many degrees they have doesn’t say much about actual educational attainment.

When I moved to the Rio Grande Valley in 1980 to teach at (then) Pan American University, I was appalled at the abysmal quality of education of my students. Most could not write and had very limited analytic and critical thinking skills. They weren’t “dumb,” just poorly educated even though they had graduated from high school.

Over time, the quality of our public schools in the Rio Grande Valley began improving; at least until Abbott was elected Governor. Conservatives almost never want a well-educated populace, and he began pushing for legislation, policies and programs that weakened public school through the State, especially majority minority school districts.

Abbott and his anti-education Republican Legislature established idiotic program like STAAR, which as Ms Clarissa Riojas notes in her Rio Grande Guardian article in the same issue as yours, standardized testing is antithetical to actual eduction. It’s a “monkey see, monkey do” pretense of education. REAL education stresses development of the analytic and critical thinking skills of students. It is not some stupid rote process.

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

In seventeen hundred and seventy-six, the colonials were in a hell of a fix.

In eighteen hundred and sixty-four, we were fighting the Civil War.

In nineteen hundred and forty-five, the bomb burned the Japs alive.

In nineteen hundred and seventy one, we shot gooks just for fun.

American history; who give a damn.

I don’t think this is the kind of education you want our schools providing students, but you tacitly are encouraging precisely this when you focus on inane topics like years of education attained rather than the substance of education being provided. To illustrate my point, my father is a good example.

My father was a Tennessee farm boy who came of age shortly before the Great Depression. For reasons I need to address, he dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. But he understood the value of education and educated himself. I remember, as a child, watching my father pour over the newspaper and books. He worked in insurance, first selling insurance, then rising to management, and finally becoming vice president of a national insurance company. Had he not educated himself, had he not developed good writing, and critical and analytic thinking skills, he never would have risen to vice president of a large insurance company. He might not even have been able to be an insurance salesman.

So, years of school and degrees held are irrelevant beyond possibly getting a person in the door. Consequently, your focus should not be on degrees attained, at least not without a HUGE qualifier. Your focus should be on the substantive quality of education provided and intellectual development gained. Standardized multiple guess exams do not even begin to do this.

Respectfully,

Samuel Freeman, Jr., Ph.D.  (Yes, I proudly am my Daddy’s boy)

Editor’s Note: The above guest column was penned by Samuel Freeman, a writer and researcher, Viet Nam Veteran, and former university professor based in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The column appears in the Rio Grande Guardian with the permission of the author. Freeman can be reached by email via: srfree1542@icloud.com