Teaching 1 Critical Thinking

Throughout the history of education in the United States, both in the public school system and in higher education, imperialist capitalist white-supremacist patriarchal politics has shaped learning communities, affecting both the way knowledge has been presented to students and the nature of that information. It has only been in the last twenty years that there has been radical questioning of what we teach and how we teach it. Education as a tool of colonization that serves to teach students allegiance to the status quo has been so much the accepted norm that no blame can be attributed to the huge body of educators who simply taught as they were taught. When even a small child can question “If the Native American Indians were here before Columbus then how could Columbus have discovered America?” there must have always been teachers who questioned, who saw clearly that much of what they taught was aimed at reinforcing the politics of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.