The article does not really indicate why they walked out, other than presuming that it was due to perceived irreverence. Critical thinking too often falls by the wayside in schools because there is a lack of consensus ... [+] about how to teach it, and even what critical thinking is. Being skeptical is a fundamental skill and perspective that comes with critical thinking. And even that has been taken out of context, because the town rejected the installation on the grounds that it was too close to a housing development and a highway -- they actually have other solar farms in the town. In other words, Jefferson is telling us that a free society can only work well when its population is sufficiently educated to be skeptical of the things they are told by leaders (religious, political, business, you name it) and, as a result, question and think about those ideas before accepting them. We made it easy for you to exercise your right to vote. Being free is reduced to acting as we would like to act, which turns out to be suspiciously similar to acting as those around us act, which turns out amazingly like acting as we have been conditioned to act! However, an electorate that does not understand the issues on which the quality of life depends cannot hope to do any such thing. Indeed, in 2012, the platform statement for the Texas GOP stated, "[w]e oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that...have the purpose of challenging the student's fixed beliefs...". Professor of Religious Studies and Human Dimensions of Organizations, University of Texas, Austin, Sign up for membership to become a founding member and help shape HuffPost's next chapter. Prejudice and intolerance is rampant in the world (and on the rise in the age of Trump). It's also closely tied to religious ideologies associated with many Christian sects, in particular, that arrogantly reject that there can be any other truth aside from the beliefs they profess and attempt to spread. I respectfully suggest that these are questions that all of us need to think about. A terrifying trend in America is the rampant increase in anti-intellectualism. The Texas GOP backtracked after criticism, but this betrays one of the most profound problems our society faces -- an unwillingness on the part of many on all sides of the issues to accept and even embrace the idea that our beliefs shouldn't be fixed, but should be open to challenge. Many who do vote cast their votes in response to simplistic slogans (Make America Great Again) and emotional nonsense that is so transparent that any thinking person could easily see through it. There is an on-going nation-wide trend that most new tenure-track faculty hires are/will be predominantly researchers and that the percentage of “contingent” faculty at the non-tenured “Instructor” or “Lecturer” rank increases each academic year. Ignorance isn't a monopoly of any one political party, religion, or interest group. Certainly our society does not see itself as indoctrinating its’ young or discouraging intellectual development. Being skeptical is a fundamental skill and perspective that comes with critical thinking. To put the point in other words, issues and events which, to be approached fairly must be approached from many points of view, are often (perhaps mostly) analyzed and answered from one-side, or perhaps at most two, socially dominant points of view. In my view, basic schooling for the most part has become drab, empty, passive, and sluggish; it is a mass of rules, permissions, sanctions, authorizations, and standardized tests designed to assess rote memorization and abstract concepts that require little or no critical thinking. There is ample evidence that the national focus on test scores leads to teachers who teach only to test answers and not to enhancing intelligence. An ideology that resists or rejects critical thinking in favor of blind adherence to fixed belief is anathema to maintaining a free society. Social life effortlessly and skillfully fosters collective illusions while personal life fosters individual ones. Once our beliefs become fixed, we lose our ability to think, and that is a most dangerous situation in a free society. We must learn to do something that is quite new to many people: to identify not with the content of our beliefs but with the integrity of the thought process by which we arrived at them. Education and critical thinking skills are the most powerful tools to ensure people live in a society where their rights are respected by their fellow citizens and by the government. The Bachmann quotation is a meme created by a Facebook group that posts fictitious quote memes and attributes them to conservative politicians and others, for "entertainment" purposes. However, by and large, what purports to be education is often indoctrination. So, for all of these reasons and many more, it is my opinion that we (individually, as a society, and within a teaching/learning environment) must cultivate and value self-disciplined, independent, open-minded thought. In another incident, a meme circulated quoting Michele Bachmann as having compared Donald Trump's wall at the border of Mexico with the Great Wall of China and indicated she said, "you don't find any illegal Mexicans in China." There are plenty of true examples to make it easy to be lazy about fact checking when it comes to the GOP. Why do some people take pride in the fact that they don’t think? The critical thinking gap is one of the most significant, yet overlooked equity challenges in education today. All rights reserved. As a practical matter, however, we show little interest in understanding or eradicating it. Residents in Woodland, North Carolina rejected installation of a solar farm and during public hearings one individual asserted that the solar panels would "suck up all the energy from the sun" while a retired science teacher stated that, no one could tell her solar panels don't cause cancer. These are just a few questions that I have been thinking about. Ah, self-deception reigns supreme. Students generally do not question what they hear, read, or see, nor are they usually encouraged to do so. Students typically do not challenge the thinking of other students or of the instructor, nor do they want to have their thinking challenged.