OMG, what a waste of legislative time and money! This turkey needs to be euthanized, quick! (I mean the piece of legislation.)
While there may be legitimate debate over how to date past and present events, to even contemplate pushing a bill like this onto the public schools represents pandering to special interest groups in a most shameless fashion.
Bad legislator! Let go of this issue and go fix the budget, find more funds to cover the Medicare prescription mess the feds imposed on us, and work to get the drug addicts out of years of prison and into treatment, where it costs us citizens less!
<<sigh>>
This from the state that brought you Fightin’ Bob La Follette, Gaylord Nelson, Tammy Baldwin, and Russ Feingold? Oh well, we brought you Joe McCarthy, too. Hopefully we’ll never send Reynolds to the US Congress.
Noooooooo! Not on the legislative floor! Bad Senator!Whap!
It would never survive an establishment test. The government does not have a right to decide who the “Lord” is or to require children to be taught that as fact.
BCE and CE is not “politically correct,” (what a stupid, overused little hate-phrase that is) it is the standard convention now used by historians and scholars. If any attempt was ever made to force public schools to adopt a Muslim or Jewish dating system, I wonder how this asshole would react.
Couldn’t the use of BC and AD in school textbooks be challenged on constitutional grounds? Not that they bother me in the least, but if legislators are going to start introducing daft measures such as above then they should be forced to defend the presence of Christian dating systems in public school textbooks.
It coincides because it is specifically used in order to have a non-Christian designation for making a distinction between years that came before the year 0, and years that came after.
It actually has quite a long history itself, and is not some recent “politically correct” (i, too, hate that phrase) adoption. You can get some idea of its history from the Wikipedia article on the subject.
They just renamed the AD to CE(and BC to BCE, Before CE) so that it’s not overtly religious. The AD/BC thing is probably inaccurate anyway, as there’s evidence that Jesus couldn’t have been born after 4 BC anyway.
It’s the same dates. It’s just an attempt to not divide the world by an (incorrect) estimate of Christ’s birth, which becomes rather ridiculous when we’re talking about non-Christian cultures.
Hell, it’s worth it simply because there’s no hard evidence that Jesus was born in 1 AD! “Scholars believe that Jesus Christ was born in the year 3 Before Christ.”
The dates are the same as BC/AD but with the religious component removed. It also should be noted that the traditional BC/AD system is inaccurate (it’s off by at least four years) and using the “common era” is a way to continue using the dates that everyone is accustomed to without being historically inaccurate and without imposing assumptions about who s “our lord” on people who are not Christian.
That should be at least 4 BCE actually. That’s when Herod the Great died. If Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, he couldn’t have been born later than 4 BCE.
Because it is the era commonly used for calendars throughout the western world. (It certainly isn’t “before and after Christ,” even if Dionysius Exiguus thought it was.)
In all seriousness, I wonder how easy it would be to make this work. I believe it was in James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me that I read about how if a large enough state (ie, California or Texas) mandates something for its textbooks, it can affect textbooks all over the country, but I doubt Wisconsin has enough pull with the textbook publishing industry. If they can’t find an acceptable textbook that fulfills all the educationl requirements the state mandates AND this new silliness, they might just be fucked.
As someone who does research on the post-WWII education system, i can tell you that it’s Texas that has the really big pull in terms of influencing textbook content, especially at the high school level.
The reason for this is that, while California is larger than Texas, California only adopts textbooks at the state level up to grade 8. At the high school level, California textbook adoptions are done by school districts.
Texas, on the other hand, has state adoption right through to the 12th grade. Local districts are not required to use the state-adopted textbooks, but if they decide to choose something different, then they have to pay for them out of their own budget, rather than having them provided by the state. Unsurprisingly, most districts go with the state adoptions.
Even more importantly, Texas has had, since the 1960s, a system of hearings that make up its textbook adoption procedure. The books are adopted by the textbook committee, but members of the public and other interest groups are also allowed to protest against any textbooks that they feel are inappropriate. They have to submit a written protest, and are then allowed to make a statement at a special hearing in front of the textbook committee. At this hearing, the textbook publishers are also permitted to defend their books.
One imbalance in this system is that the rules only allow for people who want to protest against particular books. There was no provision made for people who wanted to support or defend a particular book, except for the publishers themselves. So if, for example, a religious group took exception to a science textbook’s account of evolution, they could make a protest, but a scientific group was not allowed to make a statement in the book’s defense.
Protesting against textbooks has become something of an industry in Texas, especially among conservative groups, with the by-now-infamous Mel and Norma Gabler leading the way (Mel died just over a year ago). This is another reason that Texas has such a disproportionate influence on textbook choice—the large number of conservative groups in the state that make a habit of opposing textbooks. Here is another article on the subject.
I’ve spent time in the Texas State Archives and in the textbook division at the Texas Education Agency reading the transcripts of some of the public hearings into textbook adoptions, and in many cases over the years the textbook publishers have caved in to the demands of protestors rather than risk having their book adopted. The Texas market really is that important to them, and this in turn dictates what textbooks educators in smaller states get to choose from.
It does, however, happen to have been brought into wide use either by or on behalf of Jewish scholars, which might easily start middle American fundie thinkers peeing their Sansabelts with thoughts of “cultural elites” and “liberal conspiracy.”
Personally I still use BC and AD, this BCE and CE stuff is pretty new to me and I see no reason to change my habits. Plus, BCE and CE are still based on a system that theoretically divides time based on the hypothetical birth of a religious figure, so I don’t really see them as being a very good attempt to secularize things if that’s really what was behind the renaming.
BCE and CE is at least more accurate though, as even most Christians are well aware we don’t know what year Jesus was born anyways.
The term “common era” is also handy because it’s a noun, instead of an adverbial phrase like “anno Domini”. If you want to speak of this here now A.D. era-thing as an entity, you have to use an awkward or religiously specific phrase like “the years designated A.D.” or “the Christian era” or “the years since the [traditional but historically incorrect date of the] birth of Christ” or some such.
Whereas, if you just want a simple way to express the concept of “years as they are currently conventionally numbered in the majority of international standards and references all over the world”, you can accurately and descriptively call it “the common era”.
Actually, the “imposing Christian assumptions about who’s our lord” part can be ducked, I think. There’s no reason we have to translate the phrase “anno Domini” as meaning “in the year of our Lord” even if that’s the conventional translation. I always think of it as just shorthand for “anno Domini Christianorum”, “in the year of the Christians’ Lord”.
I’ll see you your nitpicky nitpick and raise you an even nitpickier one: the variant of the BCE/CE system that’s used for astronomical year numbering does have a year 0. It also has negative integers in place of the BCE years. So the year 1 BCE is year 0 in the variant system, 2 BCE = -1, and so forth
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