Critical Thinking – Until You Disagree?

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Every field has its buzzwords. Education is no different. One that you’ll hear frequently is ‘critical thinking.’ Indeed, in a downloadable poster explaining the 2026 Standards for the Teaching Profession,  the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, expects teachers to “Enable learners to be active participants in their learning” so that they can develop critical thinking. At Manukau Christian School, we seek to train up responsible and courageous disciples of Christ who seek to apply his kingship to all of life. So for us, it’s obvious that the end product of 13 years of education should be a young man or woman capable of self-governance who is able to discern wisely how to act and think.

But how are we to train up our students in this essential skill if teachers risk professional consequences for engaging in critical thinking themselves?

Let me share with you a somewhat disturbing insight into how viewpoint discrimination occurs in New Zealand education. Earlier this year, before we had received our final ERO report, I took a phone call from a woman (whom I choose not to name) who works in the Education Review Office. The call left me wondering how much room there really is for critical thinking in our profession.

As part of its review of our school, ERO had checked out our website. A couple of articles I had authored apparently concerned them. One questioned whether students expressing conservative views about politics and family should be labelled extremists. The other challenged the place of Treaty obligations in school governance and supported the Government’s proposed changes.

The woman told me that ERO had concerns about these articles and had consulted the Teaching Council about them. The Teaching Council had apparently told her that in the absence of a complaint they would take no action. Nevertheless, she pointed out that these articles placed me at risk. References to professional standards and registration were made as well as broader risks to the school.

Naturally, I wanted to know exactly what the problem was. Which parts of the articles were concerning? What, specifically, had I written that might put my professional standing at risk? The articles in my mind seemed tame and non-inflammatory – to be sure they went against the majority view in education circles, but we believe in critical thinking in education, right? She declined to explain. I also asked whether the people expressing the opposing views who I was responding to would raise the same concerns from ERO. She declined to comment on that too.

Now, I am quite happy for someone to challenge what I write. I believe that iron sharpens iron. Show me where my facts are wrong. Challenge my argument. Explain why my conclusions don’t follow. That is how discussion should work. That is called critical thinking, and I’m all for it.  

But that was not what happened in this conversation. No particular error or breach of a professional standard was identified. Instead, I was left with the impression that expressing these views could put my livelihood, and the school, at risk.

It was not an explicit instruction to take the articles down. But it came across to me as a veiled threat. And it left me asking: how many teachers, receiving a call like that, would simply decide it was wiser to keep their heads down and toe the majority line.

I immediately contacted the Free Speech Union, setting out what had happened and asking whether this was normal or appropriate. Their assessment was that signalling professional risk over lawful speech, without identifying a specific breach or explaining the concern, was an inappropriate use of regulatory authority. They also considered that my account raised significant concerns about freedom of expression and possible viewpoint discrimination. Their advice was to document the conversation and leave the articles up.

This matters to me because I want our students to be critical thinkers. I want them to question the status quo. I want them to have the courage to challenge bad ideas and promote what is good and true and will benefit our communities and nation. I want them to live in a country where they have the freedom to express their opinion without the threat of losing their livelihoods.

I have the joy of teaching our Year 12 students a course in which we examine the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. Section 13 protects freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief; section 14 protects freedom of expression; and section 19 protects against discrimination on the grounds set out in the Human Rights Act 1993, including religious belief and political opinion. These freedoms are supposed to have real implications for how public authorities treat people.

We need to resist the creeping intolerance that turns professional registration into a tool for enforcing approved opinions. Thankfully it appears this problem has not gone unnoticed. The Free Speech Union is campaigning for legislative reform in this area, supporting a proposed Regulated Professions Neutrality Bill. This would aim at stopping professional bodies from disciplining people simply for expressing lawful opinions and require regulators to remain neutral on contentious political and ideological issues. This is exactly the sort of protection we need.

At MCS, we walk quite a different path to much of the educational establishment. Yet our results speak for themselves, and parents are often desperate to secure a place for their children. We think that part of the reason for our success is because we think critically about education. We are not interested in simply following the latest educational fashions or adopting prevailing ideological positions without questioning them. We believe that education should prioritise the pursuit of truth and the development of young people who can think and act wisely. We are willing to question educational orthodoxies and pursue what we believe is best for our students, even when that goes against the grain.

And this brings me back to where I began. We want to develop responsible and courageous disciples of Christ who are prepared to stand up for what is true and good. But that requires us, as teachers and educational leaders, to demonstrate the same responsibility and courage. We must be willing to question accepted thinking, defend our convictions and engage openly with those who disagree. That is the sort of education we want to provide, and the sort of freedom we ought to defend.

Hypocrisy

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Supreme dictator for life until the oppressed kick her out office; Jacinda Ardern has waded into the fight over Bethelehem College’s statement of faith declaring marriage to be between a man and a woman. Ardern said she takes the “very simple” view that schools in New Zealand are obliged to ensure that they have a safe and inclusive environment for all children. I guess she means kinda like the safe and inclusive New Zealand she created under vaccine apartheid where the dirty vermin who chose not to take an experimental vaccine were thrown out from their jobs and prevented from taking part in civic life. She’s all for safe and inclusive. You’ll be safe and included as long as you do what you’re told and believe what she tells you to believe.

Do Facts Get in the Way of Critical Thinking?

Like many of my readers, I have enjoyed the work of Dr Guy Hatchard throughout the Covid debacle. He has demonstrated himself to be a non-conformist and a man who can think outside the government constructed ideological box. That being said, I want to disagree with Dr Hatchard on a post he wrote recently entitled ‘The Pandemic was Yesterday Today we have a Serious Problem‘.

In the article, Hatchard points out that non-conformists are often the creatives that drive progress. I think we all know this from experience to be the truth. However, where he goes wrong is when he explores how the New Zealand education system is leading to fewer non-conformists and creatives.

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Best Preparation for School?

It’s been a while since we looked at education here at The Sojournal. As mentioned in the past, I am involved in the education system and have a real interest in improving educational outcomes. I’ve commented previously on the train wreck that is the New Zealand education system. Years of intervention seem to have done nothing to stop the slide. Now we have new entrant teachers voicing concern that an increasing number of children are unprepared for school when they arrive. They struggle to ‘concentrate or manage basic tasks like getting ready for lessons’. One teacher lamented that when she began her career she would have all her new entrants reading by the end of the year whereas now she’s trying to get them ‘into the mode of how to behave in a school.’

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February Update On My Line in the Sand

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Last year, when our authoritarian government introduced a vaccine requirement for school teachers, I took a stand against this position by refusing to get vaccinated. I drew my line in the sand. Some, confused and bamboozled by government propaganda or perhaps a self-righteousness stemming from ‘having done the right thing’ immediately criticised this as an anti-vaccination position. I was knocked for demonstrating a reckless disregard for others. But these detractors were a minority. The callousness of some New Zealanders throughout the mandates has been mentioned by others, nevertheless, I want to focus on the positive. I received so much kind-hearted support that my family and I were blown away. There are some wonderful ordinary Kiwis out there who will never win New Zealander of the year, but who are true ‘salt of the earth’ people.

Some may be interested in how things have panned out for me, so I thought it was about time to give an update on my situation.

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Education is not simply a means of data transfer. It is not reducible to state-certified techniques. Education, when it succeeds, is the result of a child wanting to be like someone else. If you take away the drive train, can you really be surprised that the car won’t go? Fathers are essential to any successful school system, and no system of education can successfully compensate for the abdication of fathers.

Douglas Wilson in Father Hunger

Education and Fathers

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Peer Pressure

In a recent post looking at one of the excuses Christian parents make to avoid giving a Christian education, we focused on the holy grail of school for many, that of socialisation. In passing, I mentioned that socialisation in a secular environment could look like a child conforming to the pattern of this world rather than being transformed into the image of Christ.

Hannah Arendt, an American political commentator who wrote many books commented on the issue of peer pressure in an essay entitled “Crisis in Education”. There she compares the authority of a tyrannical individual over a child with the tyranny of a group. She writes:

the authority of a group, even a child group, is always considerably stronger and more tyrannical than the severest authority of an individual person can ever be. If one looks at it from the standpoint of the individual child, his chances to rebel or to do anything on his own hook are practically nil; he no longer finds himself in a very unequal contest with a person who has, to be sure, absolute superiority over him but in contest with whom he can nevertheless count on the solidarity of other children, that is, of his own kind; rather he is in the position, hopeless by definition, of a minority of one confronted by the absolute majority of all the others. There are very few grown people who can endure such a situation, even when it is not supported by external means of compulsion; children are simply and utterly incapable of it.

While not a Christian as far as I can tell, Arendt is right on the money and her point has implications for Christian parents. Few grown-up people can endure the pressure of being the odd one out. Witness the way your facebook friends pay homage to the alphabet cult during ‘pride’ month by changing their profile pictures. Children cannot handle this pressure at all. They are by intention programmed to imitate those around them. However in God’s design, this ought to be parents and other wise adults, not their peers. In our modern world, we bundle them off into huge schools, where they are isolated from wise adult council and surrounded by hundreds of other children their own age. To make matters worse, for the Christian, most of these children come from families who have no love for Christ and are caught up in rebellion and idolatry. How will your children stand in this pressure when the entire system is predicated on turning out children who have internalize the norms and ideologies of society – a society that is at war with the king?

How to be an Antiracist – A Review

Ibram X. Kendi has been described as one of the foremost historians and leading voices of antiracism. He is a New York Times #1 best selling author and a contributing writer at the Atlantic, just to list a few of his accolades.[1]

In 2019, Kendi published “How to be an Antiracist” which was praised by the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind”[2]

In this book Kendi offers a personal memoir in which he retells significant events from his life and explores philosophical ideas around race and racism. The book maps Kendi’s own journey towards ‘antiracist’ ideology.

What I found particularly helpful about this book is how forthright Kendi is about the radical nature of his beliefs. Many Critical Theorists and grievance hustlers are often too embarrassed to state their true intentions outright. Not Kendi. From out the gate, he is willing to espouse the most radical forms of Critical Theory ideology and put into words what his contemporaries are sheepish to admit.

For example, on page 18 he says this

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.[3]

Now consider just how radical a claim this is. “Any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity”. By this standard, the policy that makes murder illegal would be considered a racist policy because this policy produces a disparity between the races. What Kendi refuses to recognise is that proportional representation in outcomes is something that has not been achieved or even approximated in any society in recorded history.[4] Moreover, in order to achieve proportionate outcomes, governments and institutions must discriminate against people on the basis of race or ethnicity.

What might this idea look like in practice? Well, in New Zealand, a surgeon might triage his patients and determine who needs surgery most urgently and create a waiting list based on urgency. He may also take into account how long a patient has been waiting. Both these factors would be considered racist by people like Kendi because these sorts of policies produce a disparity between different ethnicities. Instead what surgeons now have to do is give priority to Pacific Island and Maori patients in order to create more ‘equitable’ results.[5] Surgeons need to discriminate against people based on their ethnicity in order to be ‘antiracist’.

Now before I am accused of misrepresenting Kendi’s positions here; Kendi himself is happy to state this explicitly. He says this on page 19;

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.[6]

Ibram X. Kendi is more than happy to discriminate against people based on the colour of their skin. He is happily content to award certain people with advantages and burden certain people with disadvantages based purely on their participation in one ethnic group or another.

By any meaningful standard, Kendi is a racist.

He is an ethnic discriminator. He is the one who treats people differently based on the colour of their skin. The great irony of Kendi’s book is that it is a masterful work of projection. The guy who openly calls for race-based discrimination has the gall to call racist anyone who might advocate for impartiality and equal treatment before the law.

RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.[7]

Kendi is not anti-discrimination, rather, in many cases he is pro-discrimination. For Critical Theorists any disparity has to be explained by some form of oppression. Kendi has a predetermined commitment to the worldview of oppression. He does not examine the evidence to determine whether or not racism exists, rather, racism and oppression are the very lenses through which he examines all evidence. So overriding is this principle that Kendi can assert;

A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.[8]

In his attempt to get rid of any other explanation for disparities, Kendi wants to make clear that the cause for disparity cannot be the results of any factors within the group itself. For example, suggesting that educational disparities between Asian students and Black students are a result of cultural difference, namely that Asians generally value education more than Blacks, is considered racist. Yet studies show that Asian students prefer to spend more time doing school work than Blacks.[9] These disparities are not peculiar to Blacks in America. In Australia, Chinese students spent more than twice as much time on homework as their White counterparts.[10]

Kendi is not concerned with these kinds of explanatory tools, however. Like other Critical Theorists, he simply considers empirical evidence, soundness, and reason to be tools of oppression.[11]

Anyone who would suggest paths of cultural improvement is merely an ‘assimilationist’;

ASSIMILATIONIST: One who is expressing the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group.[12]

Seventy percent of black children are born to single mothers. The black community would be enriched if they raised children in stable two-parent households. Children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.[13] Pointing this out is not racist. Refusing to recognise responsibility for this cause of disparity and suffering is what truly damages communities and cultures.

The full destructive force is seen later in the book when Kendi advocates the tearing down of capitalism, and why not? When people are free to own property and make decisions based on their own preferences, disparity will result. Some ideas are better than others. Some products are better than others. Some people are able to generate more wealth and produce more than others. All of this, by Kendi’s definition, is racist;

To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body.[14]

Kendi’s vision of utopian equity is unachievable in a free society. When people are free to make decisions for themselves disparity will always exist. This is not a bad thing. No one complains that Pacific Islanders are ‘over-represented’ in the All Blacks. No one complains that Blacks are over-represented in the NBA.

If we want to manufacture equal outcomes in all institutions, then the only way this is achieved is through the kind of tyrannical oppression that has wrought misery and suffering throughout the globe. Communism and socialism share Kendi’s goals of equitable outcomes, and the fruit of this ideology has been 100 million dead in the last century.

It is frightening that Kendi seems fine with top-down oppression in order to achieve his utopia. It is even more frightening that people who consider themselves compassionate and on the side of the oppressed are praising his book and supporting his deadly ideas. Elsewhere Kendi has advocated an “antiracist amendment” to the constitution;

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined). It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.[15]

Great! Just what we need… An antiracist police force that can wield disciplinary tools over those who aren’t discriminating against people based on race. Will these disciplinary tools include Gulags?

So, in summary, in order to be antiracist, we all need to start discriminating against people on the basis of race, we need to abandon capitalism and we need a tyrannical government agency to punish anyone who doesn’t get with the program.

With that in mind, I guess I’m okay with being the kind of hideous racist who thinks that we should treat all people equally.

[1] For more bio information see this link; https://www.ibramxkendi.com/about

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/books/review/how-to-be-an-antiracist-ibram-x-kendi.html

[3] Kendi, Ibram X.. How To Be an Antiracist (p. 18). Random House.

[4] Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, University of California Press. p. 677

[5] https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/121640802/mori-and-pasifika-given-priority-in-elective-surgery-waitlists

[6] Kendi, Ibram X.. How To Be an Antiracist (p. 19). Random House.

[7] Ibid (p. 13)..

[8] Ibid (p. 20).

[9] Thomas D. Snyder, Cristobal de Brey and Sally A. Dillow, Digest of Education Statistics: 2015, 51st edition (Washington: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2016), pp. 328, 329.

[10] Sowell, Thomas. Discrimination and Disparities (p. 102). Basic Books.

[11] Bailey, A. (2017) Tracking Privilege-Preserving Epistemic Pushback. p. 181 “By interrogating the politics of knowledge-production, this tradition also calls into question the uses of the accepted critical-thinking toolkit to determine epistemic adequacy. To extend Audre Lorde’s classic metaphor, the tools of the critical thinking tradition (for example, validity, soundness, conceptual clarity) cannot dismantle the master’s house:”

[12] Kendi, Ibram X.. How To Be an Antiracist (p. 24). Random House.

[13] https://fathers.com/statistics-and-research/the-consequences-of-fatherlessness/

[14] Kendi, Ibram X.. How To Be an Antiracist (p. 163). Random House.

[15] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/