“This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook”

Snagged from supergee, here's a article to send a shiver down the spine of any secular humanist, science teacher, historian, or anyone who believes in solid, fact-based education.

With childlike glee, McLeroy flipped through the pages and explained what he saw as the gaping holes in Darwin’s theory. “I don’t care what the educational political lobby and their allies on the left say,” he declared at one point. “Evolution is hooey.” This bled into a rant about American history. “The secular humanists may argue that we are a secular nation,” McLeroy said, jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis. “But we are a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. The way I evaluate history textbooks is first I see how they cover Christianity and Israel. Then I see how they treat Ronald Reagan—he needs to get credit for saving the world from communism and for the good economy over the last twenty years because he lowered taxes.”

Donald McLeroy is one of the ultraconservative members of the Texas State Board of Education, which writes the standards for textbooks in Texas. "Among other things, they aim to rehabilitate Joseph McCarthy, bring global-warming denial into science class, and downplay the contributions of the civil rights movement."

With California's finances in shambles, the nation's largest buyer of textbooks has already said they won't be buying textbooks for a few years. Which means that Texas, the second largest purchaser of textbooks, will have an inordinate amount of influence over what our students read in their textbooks. And Texas is notoriously anti-evolution, pro-Christian, and conservative. If the Texas State Board of Education objects to what's in a textbook, the publishers will often cave to them to protect their profits -- which means that textbooks elsewhere suffer from the influence of Texas.

Read the article... Any science teachers out there? Have you had to deal with this kind of nonsense?