Unfortunately, yes. If you want to map the political system on more than one axis, you could look at economically liberal/conservative and socially liberal/con

Unfortunately, yes. If you want to map the political system on more than one axis, you could look at economically liberal/conservative and socially liberal/conservative separately, but in a two-party system, not all quadrants will be equally represented. This particularly annoys libertarians. If you want to map education politics on more than one axis, one axis could be progressive/conservative in the political sense (Are we 'woke'? Do we teach that some people are gay? Let kids pick their own pronouns? Do we have prayer in school? Base our values on the Bible? etc. etc.). The other axis is 'progressive'/traditional in terms of methods, e.g. do facts matter and should kids learn by rote? Again, not all quadrants are equally represented. The 'progressive' side in terms of methods genuinely holds that rote memorization is bad and useless, and even taeching kids to read with phonics is outdated - where that led, is explained in https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ which has been featured on HN before now too. Unfortunately, most attempts to debate the methods axis online degenerate into fights about the political axis (see also: California math reform). > What I'd say is wrong with both the US and China is failing to teach how to think. The problem is, I'd say, that there is no such thing as "how to think". Thinking about environmental policy is very different from thinking about debugging **ing JavaScript callbacks (sorry, having a bad day). You need different degrees, for a start! There will never be a way to teach social scientists generically "how to think" so they can just pick up programming in 30 days, because all you need to do is apply your thinking skills to code! In the same way, we can't just "teach how to think" in a CS class and then expect the graduates to double up as MDs in a pinch, because that's just thinking about the human body! You can only do "critical thinking" in an area where you have domain knowledge. That's one reason that memorization is required - you need the base of domain-specific facts so you have something to think with.