Teachers should be able to cultivate critical thinking in students not by expressing sympathy toward a particular political party or leader, but by offering objective observations.
Just before the presidential election, I asked my adult students if they would vote in the referendum. They said that a famous media celebrity advocated not casting referendum ballots and that they would follow what she had said, seem-ingly without understanding the reasons why.
Students seem to be so uncritical and easily influenced by how they are brought up, or simply because they believe authoritarian voices with whom they identify.
I was stunned when a 20-year-old student, who had just voted for the first time, asked me if I, in my mid-30s, had experienced the February 28 Incident.
Other older students did not know when this incident happened either. Ignorance of our own history and current events still appears to be prevalent among today's youngsters.
Looking back to my school days, I experienced a time when martial law was still in force, preventing us from publicly articulating our opinions or political inclinations.
For a long time, "political issues" were considered taboo topics for discussion in the classroom. Our exam-driven curriculum and its emphasis on rote memorization prevented us from thinking critically.
Paulo Freire, an advocate of pedagogy for the oppressed, insisted on promoting rationality in the teaching process via critical thinking and problem-solving to develop personal awareness in thinking.
This may sound radical to Taiwanese teachers, but the classroom is a place where we should cultivate independent thought. We teachers and students have been silenced because of our culture and old rhetorical systems.
To develop the ability to think critically in the classroom, I adopt doubt, belief and two-way dialogue as advocated by Peter Elbow. I distinguish between verified facts and rumors or media speculation to demonstrate how this dialectical dialogue can encourage students to think from different perspectives.
For example, from March 19 on, rumors quickly spread among the public that the pan-green camp staged the shooting of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) in order to deliver more votes and win the election.
Given the sarcastic tone of the public figures who hinted the shooting was faked, we should be skeptical of their demands that Chen acquit himself with evidence of his innocence, and instead judge the appropriateness of their statements. We should then provide counterarguments to their claims.
The pan-blue camp's line of reasoning was not based on "reasonable doubt," but instead on questioning everything that Chen did.
The reasons for this "reasonable doubt" needed to be verified, but instead, without any evidence, half of the general public became skeptical about the circumstances of the shooting.
The more often politicians expressed suspicion over the shooting, the more likely the general public was to believe them. After the blue camp requested that a prominent forensics expert, Henry Lee (李昌鈺), come to Taiwan to assist the investigation, the bullets were determined to be real and the shooting verified. Our society therefore wasted a huge amount of resources verifying the shooting's authenticity.
We tend to watch news without critically analyzing the information we receive, simply believing instead whatever public figures claim.
Media representations offer a powerful tool to affect the way the public perceives and judges. If teachers cannot encourage students to think critically from a dialectical perspective, it is inevitable that the truth as they understand it will be distorted by blind trust in the media.
If we love Taiwan, we must teach our next generation well and provide them with a more democratic environment.
The ability to think critically must not be neglected. Political issues are not taboo issues, but prime material for training children to acquire this ability.
Florence Chiu
Pingtung
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