I apologise as I'm responding to your post without having read every other post - please allow for possible overlap.
How did you come to this conclusion/this way of thinking about what you wrote above?
Critical appraisal has a very valid role within any society as long as it is in its true form ie students are encouraged/taught to approach an issue from every angle.
yes i have no problem with people taking a critical look but the problem comes when two things happen
firstly if students are only encouraged to criticise without offering any solutions that then becomes simply a downward spiral of negativity
secondly if false or simplistic narratives of history are offered it can conceal from people the true dynamics at work behind events
For example I used to be a big fan of noam chomsky. At that time i would probably have described myself as an 'anarchist' or a 'libertarian socialist'
However i noticed that chomsky would always speak in very vague terms such as blaming 'the US' or if pressed for more details the 'power elite'
But are the american people steering US policy? No they aren't. So how can entire country be blamed for the things that for exmaple the US military does? The power elite are controlling policy. So then we have to ask who the power elite are? Do you think critical theory classes in university teach students who the power elite are? No of course not because the power elite are funding much of the education system through tax exempt charities.
So at the moment we have a lot of negativity towards britain for its colonial past and this is sometimes taking expression through politics that have a racial dimension. But if you look historically at what was happening in britain during the empire building days you can find that the vast amount of british people were themselves shackled to the imperial machine for example in the factories of the industrial revolution (where they ended up after being driven off their lands during the agricultrual revolution)
So once again we really need to be digging deeper into who the power elites were that were building the british empire if we want to point a finger of blame but the simplistic narratives being taught to students in universities as part of recent incarnations of critical theory such as :
'african studies'
'islamic studies'
'asian studies'
'womens studies'
and so on do not dig that deep. Instead they cultivate victimhood narratives that are then encouraging an anger and resentment at the rest of society instead of at the few people who were actually pulling the strings to make those resented events occur
I'm saying that this is done by design by those very same power elites in order to distract the anger away from themselves and back onto society as a whole. This is called 'identity politics' and i see it as a way in which powerful people are dividing and ruling the public