I’m not and have never been a parent, so I have no iron in this fire. But I’m curious: it seems pretty apparent to me that one battleground of the left/right culture wars is what is written in school textbooks. I’m curious as to how this has shaken out in terms of what the Littlest Dopers are reading. Are yours reading science textbooks that leave creationism open as an option? Do their history texts paint Columbus as a visionary to whom the West owes a debt of gratitude? Do their social studies texts insist that the nuclear family of one mother, one father, 2.5 children is the norm?
For whatever it’s worth, I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in the school a few blocks from my house. It’s not like I can just walk in there and ask to see their textbooks.
Edited to Add: Has Book Banning made it to your children’s schools? Have their librarians been forced to remove “objectionable” books in the past couple of years?
I honestly didn’t spend too much time with the kids’ textbooks. (Other than math and science, where they tended to need help. They certainly didn’t embrace creationism. I didn’t reveiw the actual texts, but I’m sure Columbus was not treated as a hero in the Seattle Public Schools in the early 2000s.
For all the shitting on public schools, all of my kids (including stepkids) got a good education.
Lol, but when my daughter started objecting! There was this one HS teacher, beloved by all, unfortunately taught religion. He said to her mother and I “You don’t understand. She’s always arguing. And she’s relentless. But she’s not doing anything I can call her on.” The poor man was genuinely shaken… and partially wrong: We did understand.
I don’t remember the particulars, but there were some parts of my son’s calculus book that my husband, a mathematician, objected to. Nothing political, it was sloppy about some important math details.
Oh, no, she was the class atheist. Sophia just has an issue with authority and her teachers in subjects she thought useless were a favorite target. And religion was just throwing meat to the wolf.
“No, really: exactly when does the communion wafer turn into the body and blood of Jesus? In my mouth? The esophagus? My stomach?” “Sophia, I don’t know, it just does.”
For anyone who wonders, the theological answer is apparently when it the priest consecrates it during the eucharistic prayer. So well before it goes into your mouth.
Sophia would note that it still looks and tastes suspiciously like bread. (Not that I want to have this argument on her behalf, lol. I was just relaying that the kids see things they disagree with too.)
My kids also went to Catholic school from pre-k through high school although it was a while ago and the idea that a passage could “favor Catholic dogma instead of science” doesn’t really make sense to me. It’s not as if Catholic schools teach creationism in science classes - they don’t teach creationism at all , they teach evolution. * And while religion might leak into social studies or English classes, science is another story.
So sort of back to the OP - no, I never saw anything I actually disagreed with in my children’s textbooks for secular subjects.
* Talking about mainstream Catholic schools here - there are definitely some offshoots that operate schools and I don’t know what they teach
Spitballing here. That the rhythym method is preferable to hormonal birth control because reasons. That hormonal birth control can lead to all of these terrible things because reasons. That homosexuality is a choice. And so on.
Nope - they absolutely taught that homosexual activity is sinful but not that homosexuality itself is a choice. Same for birth control, abortion , pre-marital sex , remarriage after divorce and a host of other things. There wasn’t any conflict with science - all those things were covered in religion classes with no need to claim that hormonal birth control is going to lead to any terrible things. It didn’t matter if it leads to terrible things or not - you weren’t supposed to use it because the only sexual activity that was permitted was between a married couple that was open to conception. Plenty of people (including me) don’t agree with plenty of those positions but none of those positions are based in any way on science and neither do they conflict with science.
My district uses a language arts curriculum that makes some nods toward diversity, but still has some serious problems. There are a lot of units about Native Americans; but they’re all (or virtually all) about pre-twentieth-century Native Americans, and the books are all (or virtually all) written by White authors, instead of by Indigenous authors.
I was subbing in a fifth grade class when they were reading about the Nez Perce, and I asked them, “Are the Nez Perce still around?” The class confidently told me that they weren’t, that they lived hundreds of years ago. When I showed them the Nez Perce tribal website, with its daily calendar (something like “Noon: come by the fire station to get your baby seat installed in your car! 2 pm: traditional weaving lessons at the community center!”) it blew their minds.
And the fiction books they read are overwhelmingly white guys from a half-century ago. Think Phantom Tollbooth and Little Prince: not bad per se, just not remotely representative of our student population.
The priest is fully aware of that. And it’s outside the scope of this thread, but there’s an answer. Not one i personally believe in, but it’s all reasonably consistent and coincides with physical observations.
Anyway, yeah, I’m sure health class and intro to human sexuality are topics where politics can intrude. My biology text was fine, but my high school biology teacher apologized to the class for the text book’s presentation of evolution. One of my history teachers always referred to “the war between the states”. Lots of areas can be political.
My son is in 4th grade in Florida (I know!), but I haven’t reviewed any of his textbooks.
He does, however, have to do some reading each night as part of his homework, and he gets to choose what he wants to read (Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a popular series, but he also recently finished a series by the woman who wrote The Hunger Games).
He’s also probably gotten way too much access to the internet, so he gets lots of other education - he turned me on to VSauce (a guy who talks about deep stuff like theoretical math concepts), for example.
Oh, and he loves rap music - Eminem, specially. So I know he’s heard things considered inappropriate for his age.
I live in the Bay Area, so no problem with book banning here. When my kid was in high school I got on a textbook review committee one year, which consisted of meeting and getting to look at the books for about 2 hours before voting on them. They were doing biology books that year, picked by the biology teachers, so to save time I compared what they all said on evolution. Not enough, but what was there was excellent. The AP book had a one page interview with Richard Dawkins.
The high school American history book was dumbed down, even for AP. Not wrong, but too many pictures. I went with my daughter to the book store and we got a non-textbook American history book, and she had no problem with the AP test.
My wife ghost wrote a high school biology book, and she was quite frustrated, because the large number of topics to cover and low word count (to make room for those pictures) prevented her from doing good transitions or giving good examples.
Lol, you have no idea. She’s kicking ass. Not too sure what she will do with her life, but she figured out the basics of this adulthood thing unusually early:
Her friends are worried about their debt. Sophia gets near-free schooling and cost of living subsidy checks.