Woody Cavenaugh

I just read an article that was so astonishingly asinine that I really though it was satire. Then I read the house bill. Now I am wishing with all of my might that it was satire.

Here's the story in a nutshell. Lets imagine you are a professor at a university. You are teaching class the same way you always have in whatever subject you are teaching. You are very familiar with your subject matter and probably published a book on the subject. One day you find yourself sued by a student. Why? Because the student didn't agree with you! WTF???

You think I am making this up? Here's the article.
You think/hope/wish this were satire or early April fools? House Bill 837 is reality

College is where one goes to learn to jump through hoops. Your reward for this is a piece of paper that certifies you can jump through a hoop. If you want a masters, you are proving you can jump through a flaming hoop. If you get your phd, the flaming hoop is moving. The side effect of college is you have the opportunity to learn stuff. What is taught is what is though to be facts as we know it, or at the very least the best theories available to us based on a civilizations collective research and thought. As a professor you are trying to instill critical thinking and a general understanding of how the world works. This isn't always cut and dried. Take literature for instance. I had english professors try to convince us of great complexity and dept about very small simple poems. There isn't any fact to the meaning of a poem unless the poet actually explained it. Chemestry on the other hand is extremely fact driven. Every time I drop a rock of sodium in this glass of water the same thing occures.

Critical thinking is the ability to disagree and debate why you disagree. Its the piller upon which our whole education system stands. It is knowledge through proof. It is the one and only skill that college teaches.

Students use the critical thinking skills they have learned to make their own judgements about things. Most everyone agrees that sodium dropped in water will always behave the same way. Everyone knows that to pass professor Whoever's poetry class all you have to do is say that every time a poet describes a flower they are really talking about a woman's sexual organs. The student knows that this might not actually be the case, but knows that to do well you have to just go along with the flow and keep your own opininons about the flower as a metaphor for the rise of the Roman empire to yourself...for now. One day you might get go for your masters, phd, or teach a poetry class and all flowers can be poltical statments if that is your choice.

In Florida what they want to be able to do is allow a student to sue the poetry professor if you think the flower is just a flower, or if you think that sodium behaves the way it does because the alien mice are quietly pulling the strings behind your back. They are trying to remove the critical thinking and civilizations collective knowledge aspects of an education and replace it with... Well, that's not clear. I think what they want is that a student goes to college goes to class, refuses to jump through any hoops, or grow in any way, and as soon as you pay the bill you are handed a piece of paper which now means...I guess nothing. Oh wait, it does mean something. It means that you bought a piece of paper.

They seem to be doing this to protect the beliefs of those whose beliefs may be at odds with the seeking of truth. These people don't want to think. They have been told what to believe and they aren't going to let anything silly like critical thought or truth seeking get in the way of that.

Attention: If you have beliefs that you don't want anyone threatening, you can't go to college. Critical thinking is what college is about, and if you are worried about your beliefs being brought in to question you shouldn't go anywhere that questions anything as a matter of practice. If you do you are stupid, and I don't believe you should reproduce.

God abhors stupidity, thats why accidents are always painful.