Editor,
About two years ago I moved to Oak Harbor from a small town near Nashville, Tenn. I was impressed by the advertising for Trevecca Nazarene College, which promoted critical thinking as a way for women to maximize their potential.
When I looked up the meaning, I learned that, “critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively or skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing and/or elevating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning or communication as a guide to belief and action.”
Wow! It takes a college curriculum to teach us how to think effectively to maximize our potential.
This must mean that there is a serious need for people to learn how to do it right. I was impressed.
Currently, in the news, we are hearing about critical race theory.
Both use the words “critical,” but when I look up the meaning of CRT, I discover a frightening departure in meaning from critical thinking.
One teaches us to expend the effort to gather information and think clearly for ourselves.
The other says that we are to think how someone else says we are to think, and that any other way is not allowed. Otherwise, you are labeled with some derogatory term. It’s a method used to direct and control the thinking of people who can’t, or won’t, think for themselves.
What I believe I see is a movement that has basically good intentions to improve the way our society visualizes and treats the rights of minorities to speed up the tides of change to their advantage.
Sometimes it take more than one generation for old ways to become a thing of the past.
Some people claim that it may be a danger signal that a totalitarian elite government will eventually force the common person to accept their theory as fact, and be deprived of freedoms that our constitution affords.
I think that we need more critical thinking and less listening to only one politically filtered source of information.
We can look to current Utopian societies in China and Cuba to see just how the Marxist trap gets set and shut.
Don’t let the Judeo-Christian values of love, mutual respect and tolerance upon which our nation was founded become tread underfoot by an elite, misguided, power-hungry political movement.
Herbert Reissner
Oak Harbor
