“This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook”

[sleigh]

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?

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

This sort of thing is why I'm calling this era the Counter-Enlightenment.

B

Si!

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

It's back to the caves...

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Nice nomenclature!

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I specialize in that, you know.

B

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

And it's not just these issues. It's a general belief that "experts," meaning those with actual education and practical knowledge of the topic under discussion, are -- by their very nature -- untrustworthy.

B

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Go ahead if you'd like. Heck, I wouldn't have seen the article if I hadn't noticed supergee's note.

[spaceoperadiva.livejournal.com]

I saw this article the other day. Scary, scary stuff and definitely one of the reasons I homeschool.

The thing that's really interesting to me though, is that one of the buzzword phrases of the super right wing conservative Christian homeschoolers has been "critical thinking skills". Like for years! One of their big complaints with the public school system for the decade that I've been homeschooling has been "public schools don't teach critical thinking skills!" And now that the public schools are trying to correct that, suddenly critical thinking skills are gobbledygook? I makes me believe the rumors that the ultimate goal of the Radical Christian right is to destroy our public school system.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Well, to them it's critical that their children have a particular sort of "thinking skill" wherein they think that the voice of authority in their religion is absolute and they should just shut up and agree with it.

I mean, it's not easy to get kids to think like that unless you teach them. Gotta train those brains young!