this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2026
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Truly excellent post, and a special thumbs up to the use of McGuffin in this context.
You are describing Critical Thinking Skills, something that gives people the ability to recognize and dismiss propaganda, among other things. Critical Thinking is how we are meant to process information, and without it, people substitute the kind of chaotic thinking you describe.
Conservatives recognize Critical Thinking Skills as dangerous to their important propaganda machine, so controlling education, and suppressing the overt teaching of Critical Thinking Skills is an important on going mission.
I was lucky to have three years in high school with a subversive English teacher that used his subject to teach us Critical Thinking Skills, and hone them. I didn't recognize what he had been up to until years later, and I was so pleased that he was so much more subversive than I ever knew.
This is absolutely about critical thinking and I wish we could all be so lucky to have a teacher like you did.
But I realized in typing this out that I have stopped saying the term "critical thinking" years and years ago, because like other terms it has basically lost all meaning, like "gaslighting." People just say it without any idea what it means, so I stopped saying it. Instead I try to explain it to people without naming it, because people on both sides of every issue think they know what it means.
We need some kind of new order with a nationalized Mr Rogers type system for teaching people the most basic shit all over again. Literally, I am astonished how people missed even the most basic lessons from Saturday morning cartoons, I feel like a huge segment of the population were watching G.I. Joe as kids and routing for Cobra or booing the public service messages at the end.
I tried to get in touch with Mr Clark at one point, but he had passed away about 5 years earlier, so I honor him by talking about him now and then. Easily the most influential teacher of my life, the kind of teacher ALL teachers should aspire to be.
In what way did he teach you critical thinking skills?
In 10th grade English, we had to write a few papers where we had to defend a position, using strictly documented sources. That taught us how to organize our thoughts, and rely on sources, not our own opinions.
In 11th grade, we had Shakespeare 1, in which we read several plays, and discussed them in class from the directors perspective so we had to decide how to best tell the story, and defend our choices. The desks were arranged in a giant circle, so that when you were debating a point, you had to face the person you were debating with. The ultimate lesson was that the objective was to decide on the best idea, not just win the debate with your inferior concept, and that sometimes means leaving your own idea behind, in favor of the better one. We learned that there is no shame in acknowledging an objectively better idea.
12th grade was Shakespeare 2, and more polishing of our skills.
I thought we were just learning Shakespeare, whom he taught me to love to this day, decades later. It wasn't until years after high school, when I was listening to Rush Limbaugh when he first came on the scene, and wondered why his obvious propaganda wasn't seducing me like it was seducing other listeners. That was when I realized that my Critical Thinking Skills were better than most peoples,' and that all tracked back to Mr. Clark's English classes. He's the one that taught me how to think properly, as I thought I was just enjoying Shakespeare.
Mr. Clark was a flat out fucking genius.