Restricted-Code Conservatism

Abstract

My aim in this chapter is to justify a leftist viewpoint in teaching, within the particular disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, framework of the teaching of critical thinking, supplemented by a body of scholarship going back to the 1950s in the fields of social and developmental psychology, sociolinguistics, and political socialization—all pointing to a conclusion correlating lower stages of critical thinking or cognitive development with what I will call restricted-code conservatism. I reiterate that I contrast this notion to elaborated-code versions of conservatism that are on the same cognitive level with elaborated-code liberalism.