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Texas Narrowly Rejects Allowing Academics To Fact-Check Public School Textbooks (csmonitor.com)
jriding writes with news that in a 8-7 vote the Texas State Board of Education rejected a plan to create a group of state university professors to fact-check textbooks approved for the state's 5.2 million public-school students. The CS Monitor reports: "The Board of Education approves textbooks in the nation's second-largest state and stood by its vetting process — despite a Houston-area mother recently complaining that a world geography book used by her son's ninth grade class referred to African slaves as 'workers.' The publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, apologized and moved to make immediate edits."
The 'facts' are not always truth, and the reviewers have their own bias. Here is a great example, the War of 1812. In the US they teach how England was the belligerent and that it was a war between the US and England, defending the US from England. In Canada, they teach that the US was the aggressor. In other parts of the world they teach that the US sided with Napoleon and include the war as part of the Napoleonic wars. Which is truth?
Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property. Tell you what, we could subject you to the same things as the slaves were, and you could tell us your thoughts on the difference.
This isn't about being PC, this is about pretending people who think that saying "well, it wasn't that bad" aren't morons.
"Workers" aren't chained up, brought thousands of miles, bought and sold, killed or maimed at will.
You simply can't talk about slavery and try claim you're being "PC" by referring to them as "workers" instead of what they really were. At that point you're just saying stupid shit like "well, slavery was a matter of historical perspective, and if you were a landowner these were valuable employees". This is literally whitewashing history to gloss over the details and downplay what actually happened.
That's not PC. That's fully intellectually dishonest, and re-casting slavery to pretend it wasn't that bad. This is fully revisionist history and dishonesty so a bunch of white folks can pretend like it was all a big misunderstanding ... and I say this as a pasty white guy.
Essentially Texas has said their education is no longer about facts, which means who knows what kind of crap will creep into textbooks.
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Whah, hail no!!! We don' want none o' them smarty pants egghead perfessers and braniacs messing' with our beloved holy sacred bullshit stories, or where will it end?
Purty soon lil' Johnny and Janey won't be believin' that this here Earth is flat an' was given to us personally by Jebus Christ hisself!!
And the so-called "slaves", they wuzn't slaves, they wuz "involuntary happy helpers" who got free food and shelter!
Not only that, but mah ancestors hunted dinosaurs with a flintlock way back when, it sez so in mah Holy Book, Not that OTHER filthy dirty lyin' FAKE "holy book" that those differnt' lookin' peeple read from, 'cuz they's all goin' ta' HAIL when they die, yes siree, mah pappy done tol' me so.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Is it me or are do others here think the next 20 years in the US is going to be an extremely rough ride? In less than 10 years we will have to deal with kids who grew up with these textbooks in our college system. In another 10 years they will start to become our "leaders". in 40 years they will be in the Senate and House making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there.
In his subjectively honest autobiography "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", Richard Feynman devotes a chapter (Judging Books by Their Covers) to this and related issues in textbooks. The truth of the matter is the books go mostly un-reviewed. Sure, they hire teams of committees to review them, but more likely than not, nobody on any committee so much as opens them up, much less fact-checks them. They are however lavished with free dinners, vacations, and other graf. The book deals are worth millions, after all.
He recounts when he was on such a committee and was unable to get a criticism in edgewise.
Now, add some religion, politics and general bureaucratic incompetence to that and what you end up with is an all but worthless textbook and a keen hope for a teacher that can teach around it.
Meh. My kids are grown and gone. I wish them luck.
or at least I did. My economics course in High School was a propaganda platform for capitalism. There was no discussion of other competing systems, even in a bad light. Nor was there any criticism of capitalism whatsoever. Looking back it's more than a little disturbing. I was very clearly being indoctrinated into a certain way of thinking. We can argue whether it was the right or wrong way to think, but it's still indoctrination, and I was still being encouraged to accept something on 100% faith in what was supposed to be a place of learning...
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This is what your parents said.
So ... er... your example of a "controversial" issue is one about which no scientific controversy whatsoever exist ?
The only *controversy* is between science and fossil fuel companies and is about as legitimate as the one that used to exist between science and tobacco sellers and between science and lead sellers. In fact - we have physical proof now that the fossil fuel companies don't even doubt AGW themselves ! They say they do in public, but internally they trust it so absolutely that they based their schedules for arctic drilling on when ice melt would make it most profitable !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The actual wording of the textbook reads:
While that alone may technically be accurate, it's a great mischaracterization of the situation. It's even more egregious because the section of the book it's in is under "Patterns of Immigration". It's not really immigration when it's a forced migration to a place you're not even recognized as a full human let alone any chance, at that time, of being a citizen.
Having no personal experience in choosing textbooks (just buying many of the assigned texts in college - not much choice there), my view on the process is heavily influenced by Richard Feynmann's recounting the time he served on the California Curriculum Commission in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann. For those who haven't read it before, here's his chapter on Judging Books by Their Covers.
That's Antarctic sea ice - other end of the world. And the increase is only 1/3 the area of the ice lost in the Arctic. And note that's *area*, not *volume*. Old sea ice tends to get very thick over the decades, young sea ice, not so much. And I would guess that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is related to the ongoing melting of the continental ice sheet - as fresh water flows out to sea the surface water is becoming much less salty and thus freezes at warmer temperatures. (fresh water floats on salt water, and salt lowers the freezing point - that's why they salt roads to remove ice,).
Nobody claims that global warming will be uniform, in fact it's expected that some areas will get colder as weather patterns change. As will transient cold spells such as the polar vortex related freezes we've been having lately.
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You have to realize how politicized and religiously bent the texas government is. Any vetting group would be made up of specifically hand-picked individuals who would meet certain religious and political views. It would be about as academic as the Westboro Baptist Church.
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
And it would be disingenuous if it was intentional and there was no mention of slaves elsewhere. The fact that the "offending" sentence already used the word slave once in the sentence shows that they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were slaves.
A few more way to write it would be:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of men, women, and children from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of people from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of them from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
Are these all offensive too because they fail to use the word slave a second time?
Sure, they could have picked one of these other sentences which might have been better but don't assume the author was being disingenuous and trying to imply something when most likely the word selected was done haphazardly with very little intentional thought.
But if you want it to be the most factual and truthful, how about this one:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of african natives captured and sold primarily by their native country men and rival tribes from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
It's immigration (and emigration) whenever a group of people migrate from one region to another, regardless of what the reason is or how they're treated.
It's a little bit of a tricky word territory because it would be inaccurate to call them "immigrants". That word is usually used in modern English to refer to non-forced migration, so could make the reader draw inaccurate conclusions.
It is, though, completely reasonable to put the event under a discussion of "Patterns of Immigration", because that is clearly referring to large-scale movements of people with important sociological and historical impacts. Historically, many major human migrations have been the result of slavery, exile, genocide, and other such unpleasant and rather non-voluntary reasons. They're still called migrations.
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And with the Charter schools it becomes a vicious cycle.
1. Charter school takes public school money.
2. Charter school only takes in "good" students (e.g. not kids with low grades or with difficulties that would require extra assistance).
3. Students with "difficulties" are left in the public schools who have less money to help them.
4. Charter schools get better test scores than public schools. (Since they get to pick and choose not only what students they take but what test results they publish.)
5. Businesses that run charter schools profit and donate money to politicians.
6. Politicians call for more charter schools and to close public schools.
7. Repeat 1 - 6.
Unfortunately, we're seeing this in action in NY and it's not pretty.
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Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property.
Slave labor is still labor. They're still workers, and they still need to get paid. The difference is we pay them what we want, not what they want; sometimes we don't pay them enough, and they starve, and it's expensive.
That's something a lot of people miss: there's all kinds of novels written in worlds where they reference some backwards nation or evil corporation using slave labor and thus having infinite resources because it's free. Problem is you have to feed your slaves or they die; you have to give them medical care or they don't produce as good a rate of return; and somebody has to make that shit. Slaves are farming food? That's great. You can take, say, 90% of it, and the other 10% is their pay because they need to not die or you'll need to spend 60 times their monthly budget on a new slave to replace them. Think about how useless an 8 year old is as a worker; do you want to sink all that slave labor into building a new slave, 8 or 10 or 14 years before it's even useful? Maybe you can get a better deal paying sailors for 10 months of their time sailing to another country, abducting people, and sailing back with their catch.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
What it was was inefficient, expensive, and nationally embarrassing. It was so embarrassing we instituted a compromise in the Union whereby half of all states would be slave states for some 50 years, after which the Federal Government was allowed to legislate slavery away. Then we got in a war with ourselves about the whole thing. The end of slavery was put on the horizon, and then we took it by force when we got there because that's what we agreed on.
People want to write revisionist history. Some folks want to downplay the facts; others want to play them up until we're looking back on gloating, horned demons. The truth is somewhere in the middle--but not right in the middle, like the "fair and balanced" advocates want you to believe. Averaging the wrong views doesn't get you the right view; it's usually off-center.
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This is just one more indication of the sorry state of education in our country. Why should we present accurate, fair, and objective material to our students? It seems to me that this is an effort to protect the teaching of creationism, something that has no scientific grounding and is pure religious mythology.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
The thing about slavery in the US is that people hear it and think of massive plantations utilizing scores of slave labor in horrible conditions, when the reality was much different. Slaves were an expensive investment akin to machinery today. The majority of slaveholders only owned at most a handful of slaves (if that much) and treated them fairly decently. Beating a slave regularly has as much logic as a modern farmer taking a sledgehammer to his tractor because it broke down. Now, was it a horrible system that deprived people of their free will and humanity? Absolutely. Did things like arbitrary beatings and rapes occur? No doubt. But they weren't widespread, and a lot of poor white farmers lived in conditions not too dissimilar than slaves did. About the only differences between poor whites and the slaves was that the whites were still allowed to own property and participate in politics.
I'm sure someone will miscontrue what I said and claim that I said slavery wasn't bad, which it was. But I will admit that I am one of those people that believes the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, but that slavery was simply a symptom of larger underlying factors that caused the war. So that probably makes me a racist in some people's eyes.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Actually capitalism comes out really badly in many sectors when looked at from an economics point of view. Particularly natural monopolies (eg: utilities), or where there is no real competition (eg: emergency heath services).
There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.
Actually there is - pretty much every major climate shift has been accompanied by large extinction events. Just because the regional climate is becoming more hospitable to some life, doesn't mean the existing life isn't dying off, or that the new life it's becoming more conductive to can get there right away.
Sure, the tropics may eventually extend to the poles, but tropical vegetation can only spread by so many yards per year, and in the mean time the existing vegetation is dying off. The effect is even more pronounced for relatively isolated ecosystems such as high mountains. The plants and animals that call them home generally aren't well suited to crossing plains, so as their ecosystem warms they die off, without the ability to move to more polar latitudes. Similarly the low-altitude Amazon Rainforest ecosystem is unlikely to be able to traverse the mountainous chokepoints of Central America - the organisms simply aren't evolved for mountainous living or high altitudes. Some plants will make the leap it in migratory bird droppings, but whether they can survive without the supporting ecosystem they evolved for is an open question.
As for the speed of climate change, yes it IS much faster than anything mankind has experience in thousands of years. At least on a large scale - you can't honestly compare small high-speed changes with large changes that require ecosystems to move thousands of miles to adapt. And if you're comparing the climate adaptability of migratory hunter-gatherers to that of an industrialized society, then perhaps you need to check your assumptions.
And where deserts are concerned, yes, if rainfall increases immediately they should benefit. But you need vegetation, especially trees, immediately upwind to make that a safe assumption - otherwise the increased heat will tend to kill off the borderline vegetation, while the moisture simply passes overhead until it does encounter enough organic volatiles to trigger cloud formation (this is actually a major issue in southern India, where large-scale deforestation has resulted in increasing desertification of the downwind coasts. Meanwhile man-made ecological reserves within the dead zone have led to much increased rainfall downwind.)
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