This fact free and purely anacdotal OP might have been better off in the Pit, but I thought I’d see if it makes a debate first.
I own an IT company in New Mexico that does a lot of pro-bono work for the schools (as well as a lot of contract work for the schools which we get paid for). This requires me to be in the classroom frequently for various schools fixing computers, verifying connectivity, troubleshooting network problems, etc. Recently I’ve been paying more attention while I was in the class room and have been appalled by some of the things being taught there. Some examples:
Today in a social studies/history class a movie was being shown about Native American’s. It was a historical piece talking about basically how misused and abused the Native Americans were by the US Government in the past. Hey, no arguement there, as I’m part Indian myself (of the Mexican variety, but still). However the main commentator goes into a very long speech stating as fact that the US government had official policies to distribute small pox laden blankets to the Indians in an effort at genocide…and that this policy was followed through on numerous occations. I was like…say what?? I’ve seen this brought up before (I think Cecil himself did a piece on this subject) and debunked…yet its being told in class as fact. Not only that, the teacher then went on to discuss this (again as fact) citing…the movie just shown as proof. I couldn’t believe my ears, and it was everything I could do not to speak out.
As another example, in another class at a different school a week ago the teacher was again showing a movie (this seems to be pretty common these days, showing ‘documentaries’ or even movies in class) about the history of nuclear testing in New Mexico. I was kind of half paying attention as they went through a bunch of the dippy things the government did in the 50’s (drilling for natural gas with nukes appearently, trying to dig large holes with them, etc etc) when I suddenly heard the commentator say that the government had deliberately released tons of radio active material on one of the Indian Reservations in an effort to force them off the land, and had deliberately not given protective clothing to Indian workers mining Uranium on the reservations. Again, this was told as fact (with no cites, no proof, nada) to the kids…and again, after the movie the teacher focused on this one aspect to discuss how horrible the US government is…even though, to the best of my knowledge, this also has been debunked.
Anyway, there are a ton of examples of stuff like this I’ve seen recently in various schools…errors in science classrooms, errors in history (this seems to be the most prevelent for some reason with a lot of myths or psudo-facts coming into play). The debate is, is there nothing we can do about this?? I mean, I’m all for teaching the grim facts and truths about things, especially about US history. I’m certainly a science oriented guy and am all for a heavy science program in school (I feel this is probably the most important subject for our kids…a good grounding in science and the scientific method).
But is there no screening practice that makes sure the teachers are actually teaching something resembling the facts? I’m not just talking about history here either, but science too. Science teachers teaching ‘facts’ that are just plain wrong (like Phobos orbits Jupiter, or mind bogglingly stupid things about physics, and the stuff they were talking about re:Evolution almost made me cry…or just plain psudo-science, like talking about UFO’s in a science class). What kind of education are our children getting in the public school system these days?? Why is it so bad?
-XT