I have a friend who works for a textbook company. A few months ago he was talking about some projects he was working on and he mentioned a “Texas textbook.” I didn’t know what he meant and the conversation moved on before I could ask him. Then I ran across a news bite that described what “Texas textbooks” are and my blood was angried up to an extent I did not think was possible.
Why can’t these people just fall off the face of the Earth? Can we please for the love of whatever gods you follow just ship these people to another planet where they can have their little narrow-minded bigotopia without bothering the rest of us?
These two fossils (whoops. I meant “Jesus carvings”) are largely responsible for Texas’ “review” of textbooks. Check our their reviews of various texts on their site. Note that no high school science texts were rated higher than “fair” in the most recent reviews.
A teacher told me in high school how glad I’d be one day that I was educated in Maryland. He’s been proven right ever since my first undergrad semester in the south. Things like this keep on proving him right.
While you might be a little bit over-excited about it, this has been going on for years. Most texts are religion or non-religion friendly, bland-ified, stripped of content, and multicut-ed (stuffed full of “multicultual” elements, even where extremely non-appropriate and really pointless) to meet the needs of california and texas markets - and no where else. Everyone else gets taking along with the ride.
Don’t be so smug - they sell these same things all over the country.
I’m trying to do my part. When the health textbook review was announced, I made my application to be on the review board. First they gave me the wrong application. Oddly, they didn’t have any current applications for the health books even thought it was published that applications were being accepted. I returned later only to fill out the same year- old application, which of course wan’t accepted because it was …and old application.
I read the story when it appeared in the L.A. Times. When I came to the bit about the Ice Age, I had to wonder how much actual research the reporter had done.
Think about it: when you were a kid, did you actually read your textbooks? Or did you just do the problems? Did you know anyone who read the textbooks, and actually believed them? I didn’t.
Guess what? Textbooks ARE politicized, and both sides do it. I remember a liberal group pressuring a textbook manufacturer into adding some declaration from a women’s conference into their section on ‘great historical documents’. So it goes.
Only if we can figure out a way to team up them up with New England while somehow avoiding territorial logjames with the red states. My suggestion would be to get Oregon and Washington in on the act, and join the lot up with Canada. That way we’d have a nice contiguous bloc of everywhere any thinking human would want to live.
And Canada would be in there too, of course, but if they’re nice enough to loan us a few highways it’s the least we can do.
