Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal’s new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?
Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution
No Transitional Fossils Exist
Humans and Dinosaurs Co
Existed
Evolution Has Been Disproved
A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur
Solar Fusion is a Myth
It’s not just science! Look what else they’ll learn:
Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.
“the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross… In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”
It “cannot be shown scientifically that that man
made pollutants will one day drastically reduce the depth of the atmosphere’s ozone layer.”
“God has provided certain ‘checks and balances’ in creation to prevent many of the global upsets that have been predicted by environmentalists.”
the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.
“Unions have always been plagued by socialists and anarchists who use laborers to destroy the free
enterprise system that hardworking Americans have created.”
Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.
“The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns to set up his kingdom on earth.”
Watch the video. It’ll show you that I’m not just making this all up.
Fortunately, the student body at my university is largely from the upper Midwest, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry too much about an influx of miseducated kids here — but other universities may have to look at Louisiana enrollments. How much remedial teaching do you want to do?
Wut?? Oh, I have to hear more about this… unfortunately, the Google results are currently swamped with reportage of this story. Anybody know what the deal is with this?
Found some explanation of the solar fusion thing here. Heh.
A wild ass guess is that the concept offends that group of fundies because it states that the Sun won’t keep working forever. Or the reverse, because it indicates the Sun is several billion years old, not 6000 and change like the Bible does.
Ah, I see my guess number 2 is right, just not quite the reason I was thinking of.
It’s like they’re trying to be as repugnant as possible. Did God also wipe out 90% of Native Americans with exotic diseases to bring the remaining 10% to Him?
Oh, the lucky slaves! They got to learn patience waiting for the lard to release them and learned that true freedom is freedom from sin.
Fucking evil slavery apologist.
Oh, and let us not forget the “Huzzahs For Genocide!”. The Trail Of Tears was a good thing.
No fucking wonder that Bryan Fischer is comfortable spewing his racist shit for the American Patriarchy Association.
It doesn’t really matter how stupid they are because Jesus is coming back within our lifetime.
Haleluya!Haluiah!Hallylyah!Yay!
I went to public schools my whole academic career, and had almost entirely great teachers who instilled and nutured in me a love of knowledge. The teachers using these books are not the same as my teachers, and I feel sad for the children who will have this foisted upon them.
I think it is closer to the truth to state that their version of god celebrates and encourages ignorance and stupidity.
Gawd, these kids are going to be too stupid even to get into LA public colleges let alone good schools elsewhere. Well, they still need deckhands on shrimp boats, don’t they?
They really make it too complicated:
here let me modetly propose a much better new school program:
Science proves that members of the upper-class are shiny demigods who should be worshipped and obeyed by proles whose first duty is to remain eternally grateful that they can bask in the glory of their better.
Teach that to kids for ten years and get rid of any prole who displays less that absolute adoration to their masters after this time period.
Shit, i forgot to add a [/sarcasm] at the end of my modest proposal.
Attempting to rehab the Klan is odious beyond belief. The “trail of tears” didn’t get it name by accident. It might have been called the
BataanTennessee Death March for all the differences in the two events.It seems like overtly racist crap from the right has been on the upswing this year.
James#1, of course stellar fusion is wrong. If the Sun were made of coal, then it couldn’t be very old, so therefore, neither could the Earth. And that would disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.
Gravity – Natural force… Or Satan pulling you away from God?
Rocks: God’s natural appetite suppressant!
Why absolute morality requires child rapists to be sheltered.
Did you know the color pink doesn’t actually exist in nature?
Prime numbers – Teach the controversy!
Your brain, the enemy.
Women: Disgustingly sinful, or just disgusting?
The Spherical Earth “Theory”, and the Truth about the Cruciform Earth
I’ve been working hard to expose Accelerated Christian Education, so I’m glad some of this is coming to light.
I hope it results in some organised efforts to stop this happening (especially in public schools).
The thing about A Beka and ACE is that it isn’t just the content that’s awful; the educational style is abysmal as well.
A Beka is based on a teacher standing in front of a class and the children repeating word-for-word “drills” of information by rote until they’ve memorised it. Even if they weren’t teaching BS, that’s still a terrible form of education.
ACE, meanwhile, consists of completing fill-in-the-blank workbooks at an isolated, partitioned desk, in silence.
Yeah, that’s healthy.
That’s fascinating considering that Bobby* Jindal is, you know, not white.
*I initially typed “Booby”.
Thanks to BP, not s’ much, no.
Poor Louisiana. First Katrina and now this. I don’t have high hopes for its recovery, economically or socially, in the near future.
Motherfuck that’s disgusting. And stupid. I mean, “AFRICA SUCKS AND IT’S ALL BECAUSE OF COMMUNISM!” Really? That’s what we’re doing now? And then they turn around right after pretending that they give two shits about black people and pretend that the KKK wasn’t awful in every way.
#14; of course, a sun made of coal, or any other non-nuclear source of energy, still makes for an age over 100 000 years, as Lord Kelvin calculated.
What the fuck? Seriously. What kind of text book would say “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”
I believe that the North should say to Louisiana, “We like Mardi gras, but this roughly 200 year relationship has run its course. We still like you and hopefully we can be friends. Remember when you wanted to leave about 150 years ago, but we clung on to you, because we were scare of losing you. Well, we come to realize we were wrong. It was childish of us. If you want to go your separate way, you can. If fact we insist. We really should be dating other states. I hope we can be friends, but you and us both know this union isn’t working anymore.”
If you think being gay is a choice, you’re probably considering it…
laurentweppe@12
You skate too close to the truth, I think.
And, /sarcasm tag not required.
This Japanese whaling boat that discovered the dinosaur….
Was that when the seagull landed on the prow?
Wow, I was just reading this on Alternet and said to Mr Lizdamnit “Gee, I hope someone doesn’t forward this to PZ, he’ll have a coronary!” And then here it is. Pharyngula’s in my house!!!
Anyway, I can’t fathom. They publish this shit with a straight face? jonnyscaramanga, you made my hair stand on end. Good on you, though, for throwing light on this.
As horrible as the “”facts””* are, what really scares me is the teaching style of drilling, multiple choice/matching tests, and rote recitation. Just knowing people are going to be trying to not just put false information and prejudices into kids’ minds, but to try to warp those minds for the rest of the kids’ lives.
(Yep, I need extra scare quotes here)
Knowledge has been the bane of education for far too long.
Louisiana is on the forefront of combating the plague of knowledge in education.
Glen Davidson
Isn’t this the path muslims went down long ago to move from a technological powerhouse in medieval times into what they’ve become today?
It’s like a trainwreck in slow motion. And all you can do is watch.
They will also have to fund Moslem Madrassases as well. I’m sure the fundie xians are happy about that.
One of my minor criticisms of fundie-ism is that they set their kids up to fail.
Then the kids fail.
I’ve seen it many times.
The new law, as horrible as it is, is going to be challenged in court on state constitutional grounds. The Louisiana Constitution does not allow for multiple unrelated provisions to be addressed in one bill (unlike the US Constitution), so the court does not have to address the substance of the act to toss it out.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the people who voted for Jindal are not happy with the education bill. My hairdresser, who still believes that Obama was born in Kenya and is a practicing Muslim, is furious that vouchers are available to allow poor students to attend private schools like the one she and her son are scrimping to send her grandchildren to. Of course, the problem is a lot of those schools won’t take these children, and so the voucher money will go to unregulated charter schools using curricula like PZ described.
There’s a bright spot of sorts – it seems some students still want a real education.
The ironic thing is that when a Muslim school applied to be part of the voucher program, the legislators went *nuts*.
Here’s the story (apologies, it’s a PuffHo post):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/13/louisiana_n_1593995.html
I find that to be one of the most personally offensive things I’ve read in recent memory.
You see, all those people who died on the Trail of Tears, they got to go to Christ early.
Yes.
And that hasn’t really changed. Science is a don’t ask, don’t tell field in a lot of Moslem countries. And it scares the ruling theocrats silly.
There was a program not so long ago to set up science programs in the rich Arab oil states. They weren’t too interested. They love technology and spend billions to import it. But they don’t have much interest in the underlying fields that make the technology work.
That means they will always be a step or so behind the rest of the world. Doesn’t bother them.
I wonder how long until the Louisiana legislature requires by law that LA publicly funded colleges must accept all LA holy school graduates.
But remember that Evolution lead to the holocaust…which apparently is the ONLY bad genocide ever/
Only Jesus can save you from the horrible torments he plans to unleash upon the world. Let us join in prayer
*kneels* AHEM…>NOT THE FACE!!! NOT THE FACE!!! NOT THE FAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!! amen.
I think this is one of those instances that calls for public ridicule rather than a serious response. Take the Pedro Irigonegaray approach: get these guys into a public forum, and ask them: do you teach kids that fusion doesn’t occur in the sun? That a Japanese whaling boat found a dinosaur? Make their positions public, make them state them in public, and its likely that the relatively silent middle will get off its haunches and actively oppose them in the next election cycle.
So how good of a hair dresser are they to justify giving money to someone who is upset that the poor don’t eat shit and live in squalor?
Nessie is on there as an example of
people who hate teh Daily maildinosaurs living amoungst usI can see how this is true, as long as you allow for certain, um, alternate definitions of some words.
To wit:
Reform: putting the darkies and Jews and papists back in their place.
Morality: having the white Protestant man in charge over the darkies and Jews and papists and women and other undesirables.
Using the symbol of the cross: to intimidate the darkies and Jews and papists and keep them in their rightful place (and when that didn’t work, using the “symbol” of hanging the darkies from a tree).
Some communities: any place where the white protestant man kept the rest of the population in their place.
Respectability: acceptance by the white Protestant man that he should be in charge.
Politicians: white protestant men who were willing to accept the burden of their superiority.
For the fundamentalist take on Solar Fusion I suggest Landover Baptists very own Pastor Billy (don’t call me yellow) Reuben’s post on the topic
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=18076
were he does teh Bible maths.
Yeah, when Louisiana is already a contender in the race to last place for percentage of children with a High School education, this is exactly the solution they need. Pretty soon, you may not have this source of information if Romney wins
Okay, warn people to restrain their hands before reading this.
My face is sore from repeated palming.
But QED Obama is just like Romney! And by voting for obama you only encourage Democrats to be more like Republicans which they are already identical to! We have to throw our votes away or vote Republican to teach the Democrats a lesson and turn the country into a fuck hole for 4 years because we all huff glue and wack off to V for Vendetta!
From Pastor Billy Reuben’s sig from the link in 41:
Looking at some of the comments over there, it’s certainly the government they deserve.
I mocked A Beka last year. IIRC, I asked Jason Rosenhouse if he knew the religious basis for the objection to set theory, but he didn’t.
Ing @ 44
What? You mean the country isn’t already enough of a fuck hole for people to have learned their lesson?
How deep does this fuck hole go?
I’m scared. I mean, I’m scared from over here in the UK.
More genius from the Landover Baptists:
Cletus has to be a Poe, right?
Or do they really still believe in a geocentric universe?
Nessie!?
Even if it exists, plesiosaurs aren’t dinosaurs.
I know that I am stating the obvious, but this is entanglement of church and state. Ain’t that illegal in this here great country of ours?
What a Maroon,
Uh, yes. Landover Baptist Church is satire.
If they were planning to self destruct like this all along, why did they even bother to rebuild after Katrina?
What a Maroon:
Except Bobby* Jindal, who apparently gets a pass.
*Booby.
Oh. Um. How did this egg get on my face?
I just want to share that I read “Middle East” in that very last quote as “Middle Earth,” on first glance. It was much more interesting that way, at least.
I’ve looked a bit but have not found anyone making the case that this law seems to be in direct conflict with the first amendment. I am sure someone is making that case and I’ll bet there are law suits in prep. I’ll keep looking (I’m sure I’ll find it at some point), but it strikes me as a no-brainer.
How in the world does providing tax payer funds initially allocated for public education (any vouchers used are offset by money taken from public schools) to be spent on religious schools NOT run afoul of the 1st Amendment? I’d really like to hear what the proponents of this law say about this. Surely this issue came up when the law was being deliberated. What kind of thinking was used to get around the 1st? Anyone know?
bjtunwarm:
An obvious Poe. A True Christian would never use godless socialist metric units. The calculation should have been done in American units, just like Jesus uses.
If I could get “the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists” in front of my 80yo mom and her Republican 70yo brother, it might be good for a laugh. And perhaps Uncle Bubba (no joke) would think twice about Bobby J. and the Republican agenda, but I doubt it.
And this one is just sick: “God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.” Perhaps it did, but of course it killed a lot more. Hate to tell them but many of those Southeast Indians dying on the trail were already Christians. I guess Wounded Knee, Sandhill, and so on were just to win more soles for Jesus. American fundamentalist dogma is a sick rationalization for atrocities.
Massacring millions to recruit a few is standard modus operandi for this god. It sold its own chosen people out to the Assyrians (among others, multiple times), after all.
I think France can’t afford to buy back Louisiana right now. (And wouldn’t the Monroe Doctrine say something about that, even if it was offered free?)
nooneinparticular @ 57
Don’t have time for the research right now but IIRC movement conservatives have recently been arguing that the 1st Ammendment means that religious institutions are immune from any and all governmental laws, regulations, oversight etc.
From what I understand people actually used the rebuilding for grotesque profiteering at the expense of the lowest classes
Historical and economic revisionism is so infuriating, especially when the revisionists’ agenda is so blatant.
SC @46:
I have two guesses. The simplest: they don’t understand it, so it must be wrong. Plain old anti-intellectualism. The more complex: Godel’s incompleteness theorems bug them because they see the theorems as an attack on (or limitation on) God’s perfection, or omnipotence, or onmiscence, or something. Since those theorems arise from set theory, set theory must be wrong.
noone @57:
I’m guessing the ACLU has to wait for an actual illegal activity before they can bring a case, because the policy also covers some legal forms of distribution. The LSEA works the same way: since there are both constitutional and unconstitutional things you can do under it, until someone acually does something unconstitutional, the ACLU can’t argue that the (whole) law is unconstitutional.
Just to be clear, I know that there are legal challenges to this voucher program but it appears to me to be focused on the idea that the state constitution prohibits multiple issues in a single bill and that the law enacted may have been burdened in this way. I’m hoping to find someone bringing suit on 1st Amendment grounds as it is precedent that government vouchers for use in sectarian education at schools that provide religious instruction is unconstitutional. Surely the LA legislators addressed this during debate and I am curious to see what their arguments were.
I was raised on A Beka curriculum, and it is one of the many reasons that I am now atheist.
I wouldn’t want anyone to miss the point here.
The fact that the viewpoints taught in these curricula are so repugnant brings it into focus, but it’s not the main issue.
The teaching to children of *any* subjective viewpoint as incontrovertible fact is immoral. Brainwashing children with liberal ideas would be just as bad (well, almost as bad).
The real problem is that children are taught not to think at all. The method is even worse than the content.
Ing
That is correct.
I used to live in New Orleans and have followed the post Katrina privatizationpalooza with great anger and sadness. Here is one example of public housing turned over to private developpers while disposessing the residents
eric @65. You’re probably right. I went to LAACLU website and could find nothing about the current voucher debate (there was an earlier one in 2004)
When I lived in Texas, I was informed by an aquantance to not go to Louisiana with that decal of the “White Lightning Man” in the middle of my back window on my car. He had tried the same thing, was arrested, put in jail, had his car impounded, having to call friends in Texas to come bail him out of jail. Then it took him months to get his car back, plus a lot of money. The only thing they did to his car was to scrape off that decal with a razor blade. He had no drugs on him, nor did he use drugs. But seeing that decal on his window got him stopped within one mile after he’d crossed the Texas-Louisiana border as the police “knew” that that decal meant this guy was transporting drugs!!!
“Booby” Jindal will just have to except the fact that I’m keeping my “White Lightning Man” right where he is and will never attempt to enter Louisiana because I have this “gut” feeling that the state is what so many have told me, and that is as “dumb as a sack of hammers!”
QED,
No research needed. Just look at the Catholic Church’s hissy fit about insurance companies providing birth control to the Church’s employees. It may be mandated but, by gum, birth control is an affront to Jesus!
Not only do religious institutions believe that they’re exempt from all laws, they also believe that they should be the ones shaping our laws.
YHBT.
HTH!
HAND.
Sadly, some Catholics and other religious people do, indeed, seriously advocate geocentrism.
http://www.galileowaswrong.com/
Because of the connection to Russian Orthodox Monks, of course.
Adjusted for inflation and with current exchange rates, the Louisiana purchase would cost around 32 weeks’ worth of France’s tax revenues.
Of course, updating the school system would be a lot more costly: we already spend nearly 100 billion euros per years for to keep our own school system in shape, and it barely suffices.
Maybe if the US paid France to take back Louisiana…
Alareth @ #32,
“God used the ‘Trail of Tears’ to bring many Indians to Christ.”
“I find that to be one of the most personally offensive things I’ve read in recent memory.”
This one made me shake with anger. My grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee whose parents escaped from the Trail of Tears by sneaking away and making their way up the Mississippi.
I remember hearing from family that my Grandfather would never step foot into “the white man’s church”.
I understand how he felt.
Just trying to live up to my ‘nym.
When I was teaching in Texas, we had an influx of students from Louisiana, called “the Katrina Kids”. We had to do a lot of remedial work to bring them up to Texas standards, and those standards seemed rather low to me.
It’s frightening to think how much lower the educational standards of Louisiana are now headed.
Planet Charpak, Year 15.878
During the annual gathering of the pan-galactic association for geocentrism
«Oh yes, sure, you have all these mindless drones taking scientists and ingeneers word at face value, but the truth remains that no matter how certain they claim to be, none of these local bubble dwelling elitists have been able to send a ship to the border of the universe! So how can they be so sure that the Universe is not following a complex motion around Earth, huh? That’s why today, you can for only 149 credits and 999 thousandths download directly into your auxilliary brain the complete masterwork doctor Bethanoidussidella De Vachel-Villette “135 questions the anti-earth movement refuse to answer to“»
My brother and sister-in-law are teachers in the LA Public system. I have tried for years to get them to head up the Big River to where I live which – while no paradise – is hell-and-away better than Louisiana. I speak from some experience, having been born and (mostly) raised there, with about a quarter century of my life spent in Baton Rouge.
At least, then, I could comfort myself knowing that the resident of the state were laughing along with the rest of the nation at the state. Now, sadly, they have begun to take themselves seriously.
*sigh*
If anyone is wondering what the difference between corrupt Democrats and fanatical Republicans is, take a look at this state over the last 30 years or so. Those people suggesting we quit choosing the lesser of two evils, you’ve got a perfect example of what letting everyone else choose the greater of two evils results in.
If he makes it into the White House, Mitt Romney will just be Bobby Jindal with nuclear weapons. That’s worth feeling good about your Green Party vote.
– Right?
Are Jindal and Romney really the same calibre? From what I’ve heard so far, Romney seems to be less of an ultraconservative monster, what with Women’s rights and the environment and all that, than Jindal (who by the way also converted to Catholicism in his teens).
You’ve heard wrong
Back in the early ’80s when I was in the Oil Bidness in New Orleans, even the most hardened, conservative, and yes, bigoted oil company geologists that I knew accepted basic science, including an old earth. It helped them find oil.
So much for that.
Our slide back to the dark ages begins.
Oh please. Yes even when there’s no example we always ahve to play the “liberals are just as bad card”
The problem is that reality apparently now has a liberal bias.
As for teaching subjective things, SHOULD we not teach that the trail of tears and holocaust were bad?
I’m sorry, I can’t read “Accelerated Christian Education” without thinking of 9.8 m/s^2.
Q.E.D:
Good grief, do they really want to go there? Even from a Christian viewpoint, that’s surely got “be careful what you wish for” written all over it. The country wouldn’t survive religious institutions being declared to be above the law.
“As for teaching subjective things, SHOULD we not teach that the trail of tears and holocaust were bad?”
Until I read about this, I thought these were self-evident and wouldn’t need to be taught. I shouldn’t be, but I can still be surprised at how ignorant and shitheaded my fellow humans can be
That’s very bad. He had a much less radical stance on abortion back in Massachusetts, I guess I was hoping that he is just pandering now… Well, maybe probably hopefully we’ll never have to find out.
Oh, he’s definitely pandering. The only things Mittens believes in are:
1. He should have tons of money.
2. Rich people shouldn’t have to pay taxes.
3. He should be President.
Whatever it takes to reach those three goals is fair game.
The problem is that if he gets elected, he’ll be hostage to a GOP run by the likes of Eric Cantor and Michelle Bachmann, and he doesn’t have the spine to stand up to them.
@nooneinparticular (#57):
No conflict since the fiction is that any school can apply to be in the program.
I say fiction since there was this Islamic school that applied and you should have seen the shit storm that kicked up.
@We Are Ing The Matrimonial Collective (84)
I obviously did not make myself clear. I am nowhere close to playing the “liberals are just as bad” card.
What I am saying is that it is education’s job to teach children how to think. To teach them how to question, how to find answers.
These curricula not only teach bullshit, they teach it while purposely stopping the children thinking for themselves.
If you teach kids how to think properly, even if you teach them wrong stuff, they’ll have to tools to identify what was wrong and correct it. So that’s the most important thing.
My argument was that a liberal education which didn’t teach children how to think would still be a terrible education.
Wait until the Pagans, hallucinogenic drug using sects, and Wiccans apply.
It’s dodgy enough just funding religious schools. Legally they can’t pick and choose which religions to fund.
@ 59 robro says:
There, fixed that for you.
I presume those of you talking about giving or selling the Louisiana Purchase back to France are joking, but if it were to happen, would P.Z. Have to publish his blog posts in French? Seeing as how he would probably be a French citizen and all.
You’ve got to be kidding me, that’s the Louisiana purchase? Ok here’s a really dumb question, why is the midwest not speaking French creole?
#22:
Knock that separatist bullshit the fuck off.
You would be consigning millions of minorities and women to lives of unspeakable horror. Civil rights protection–gone. In a fucking flash.
The only thing keeping the south from looking like Yemen–only not as nice–is the fucking US government that we still have.
Do you want Yemen for millions of people right next door to you?
I don’t.
Fuck you.
@94
Because the Louisiana Purchase was of land that France claimed, not land that France had completely settled.
Mittens is a stuffed shirt. Mittens doesn’t matter. Mittens could be an acceptable candidate if he was running for a different party.
What matters is the monster that stuffs the shirt.
France has a long history of claiming lands but not settling them to any serious degree. That’s why they lost Canada to the English.
Supposedly, Napoleon had grand plans for Lousiana, plans involving arcane Caribbean coups and puppet regimes and using New Orleans (note: Orleans is French) as a springboard for a vast North American empire.
Then the Caribbean part of the plan went down in flames, and Napoleon suddenly had to get rid of a bad investment….
In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
Or, more accurately, those KKK members were politicians.
That happened a lot back in the day.
Take the Pedro Irigonegaray approach: get these guys into a public forum, and ask them: do you teach kids that fusion doesn’t occur in the sun? That a Japanese whaling boat found a dinosaur? Make their positions public, make them state them in public, and its likely that the relatively silent middle will get off its haunches and actively oppose them in the next election cycle.
You have too much faith in the squishy middle.
Guess who put these assholes in office?
That’s right: The squishy middle. Squishy from too much TV, too much religion too much bigotry and too little education or humanity.
Coleslaw retrieves small screws from under the bookcase, desk and dresser. Removes spring from the cat’s tail. Uses duster to knock the dial down from the blade of the fan. Reassembles irony meter.
I’m sorry, I was a little distracted for a minute. What is it we were discussing again?
If you teach kids how to think properly, even if you teach them wrong stuff, they’ll have to tools to identify what was wrong and correct it. So that’s the most important thing.
My argument was that a liberal education which didn’t teach children how to think would still be a terrible education.
You don’t get it, do you?
PARENTS HATE WHEN THEIR CHILDREN LEARN CRITICAL THINKING!
We have had several teachers in here who have horror stories about how their school administration nailed to the wall for teaching their students critical thinking. The parents go fucking bananas from it, because the kids go home and challenge the things their parents say!
Parents don’t want their kids to think! They want them to OBEY. And why do they want them to obey? Because a) it’s easier to deal with them that way; b) the parents don’t like being shown up for the dumbasses so many of them actually are, and c) RELIGION has told them that they are bosses of their children.
Why it’s not le mid-ouest.
Also, it was Spanish territory from 1763-1800.
This story was also covered here:
http://www.salon.com/2012/04/24/school_reform_for_the_corporate_era/singleton/
This coverage at Salon makes it clear that the makeover of Louisiana’s school system is taking place according to ALEC guidelines. Yes, the same American Legislative Exchange Council that brought you so many similar anti-abortion laws, that brought you union-busting in state legislatures, that brought you voter suppression laws, and that brought you several ways to decimate public education. The same ALEC that is funded by the Koch brothers and the likes of EXXON .http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed
School voucher programs, charter schools, and fucking teachers over in order to make money in the field of education are primary goals. Promoting god and ignorance are icing on the cake.
Bobby Jindal is basically selling Louisiana’s educational system for his own political gain, for the sake of his own political coffers.
ALEC specified the tactics that should be used to get controversial legislation passed before most people had a chance to look it over carefully.
They keep shoveling this bullshit even though private prisons and privatization of many other services have proven to be bad news. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/26/opinion/blow-plantations-prisons-and-profits.html
The article in Salon goes on to point out that Republicans are offering a veneer of “choice” to parents while simultaneously removing money from the public school system and thereby restricting choice.
Conservatives are also talking about increasing “accountability” while simultaneously not writing into the legislation standards of accountability. With charter schools especially they remove reporting and accountability standards.
If reform is needed, Jindal is going about it in all the wrong ways.
Ralph Reed, king of the Faith & Freedom Coalition and former criminal involved in the Jack Abramoff scandal, lobbied for keeping deplorable working conditions (forced abortions, slave labor, anyone) in the Mariana Islands as-is because the workers were exposed to the story of Jesus Christ.
Reed was pandering to corporate owners who ran “made in America” sweatshops. They gave him money. He papered over their and his total lack of ethics with Jesus stories.
Reminds me of the Trail of Tears revisionist history.
It’s okay to kill Native Americans if you tell them about Jesus first. It’s okay to maximize your profits with slave labor if you tell the workers about Jesus. It’s okay to deprive Louisiana’s children of a good education if you tell them about Jesus.
@Aquiaria, #101:
Yeah. Stop making kids too smart for God. Those exact words. When an idea’s survival is adversely affected by intelligence, the idea is a problem.
#105 Lynna
There, fixed that for you, I’m certain he’s still a criminal.
Yeah. It’s like a new Tower of Babel. But with yummy children brains.
I’ve always known my education was terrible, but by that standard I never had an education at all. I admire scientists most for being those few kids who somehow survived grade school and high school with the ability to still ask questions. Most of us had that trained out of us.
Holy magic zombie on a stick! When I was a kid I knew of a couple of families that used ACE, but didn’t really know much about it. It is so much worse than I could have guessed.
Considering we’re failing on the simple subjects of “basic history” and “reading” I think this is something that in context is a derail and drawing attention away from the huge stinking turd of conservative education.
Without accountability, reporting, and survey data, they are just going to destroy the kid’s education and not even know it.
Which I guess is the whole idea.
The christofascists really do want to create a new Dark Age for the USA. They aren’t hiding anything here.
@ 04
That is Romney’s education program in a nutshell. Federal vouchers, “choice,” including private schools, and pulling federal money out of the public school system. With a Republican Congress, this is what we can look forward to.
No, actually is was a decaying Basking Shark. The fishing boat “caught” it in 1977 and scientists figured out what it was by 1978.
They are knowingly lying. Nothing new.
When I first read the OP through, I honestly thought the second quoted section was satire, because nobody could *really* argue that the KKK were a force for reform, could they? Or that the Trail of Tears was good? It read a lot like an over-the-top caricature.
But no, it turns out that my (admittedly limited) faith in humanity was unfounded.
“Only ten percent of Africans can read or write, because Christian mission schools have been shut down by communists.”
What country in Africa is communist today? And from what source did they get this “fact”?
Why does it seem that racism, sexism and homophobia go hand in hand with Rightwing Christianists?
I feel sorry for the children in Louisiana who have to sit in classes and listen to/read this nonsense. Hopefully, this attempt to circumvent the separation between state and church is being challenged.
I think A-Beka was the “science” textbook (it’s actually a glorified workbook) that said gawd whispered the secrets of crop rotation into George Washington Carver’s ear. It just couldn’t be possible for George to be, you know, an intelligent man who had a lot of hands-on learning with agriculture and who had done a great deal of agricultural research before he mentioned crop rotation, ever. They were the same way with Newton, Galileo, and so on.
No, nobody ever has to learn anything. They can just wait around for gawd to tell them about it.
Maybe 2000 years after we could have cured a lot of diseases and fed a lot of people, but what’s a few millennia to a genocidal scumbag in the sky who supposedly lives forever?
Oh my
Oh? What is ambulocetus? Tiktaalik? I’m not a biologist, far from it, and even I know about those two. Plus by the very definition of transitional fossil every damn fossil and every damn specimen is transitional. So they’re there, you creationist fools.
Considering how many died along the way, it was a pretty fucking stupid and inefficient way to do it. If God is who he says he is he could’ve just appeared to each and everyone and proved his existence beyond a shadow of a doubt. Because he chose to make all of these individuals march from the Southeast to Oklahoma instead, he’s an evil monster. And by the way, it of course wasn’t god, it was the slaveholding Georgians who wanted more farm land for nice white people, so they begged Andrew Jackson to kick them out, which he of course did.
Or, they were plagued by robber barons and wealthy, powerful industrialists who didn’t like the idea of employees having any rights whatsoever. According to Invisible Hand/Magic of the Market nonsense, if employees don’t like the conditions of COAL MINE X they can just quit and find a different job. Too bad that’s not how the world actually functions. Some people could only work in COAL MINE X, and owner of COAL MINE X knew that, so he did whatever he felt like. The unions came about because the employees said “Wait, this isn’t okay, let’s do something about it.” And they got murdered and beaten by the wagon full for thinking that. But yeah, it’s the unions that are screwing up free enterprise, because free enterprise is always so wonderful.
This crap can’t possibly survive, right? Even in crazy ass America, in crazier ass Louisiana?
Wow, that reminds me on Joan Slonczewski’s book “The Highest Frontier”, in which there are two extant parties in the US: Unity, a merger between the Democrats and the (few sane elements of the) Republicans and the Centrists who, as the name implies, regressed back into belief of the geocentric worldview, thinking the universe only extends to the moon’s orbit.
At first reading I thought “well, a normal SFnal satirical-hyperbolic device”, but reading about contemporary US fundamentalism… if this goes on her vision might not be that far off the mark.
The belief that unions fuck everything up is mainstream
I believe there is only one correct response to this statement.
Godzilla was not a documentary!
And over a hundred comments before someone made the connection. My faith in the Horde’s collective geek cred is slipping.
P.S.
Before anyone takes issue, yes I know this is a serious issue but I am trying for some levity on the grounds that if I don’t laugh I might just break down and cry. Or go into a frothing rage. Remember mockery and ridicule aren’t just good tool for exposing your opponents silliness, they’re also there to help keep your sanity intact.
The quotes above don’t even mention the Apologia series. Aside from quite possibly being the most boring “science” books ever published, on page 34 of the “Exploring Creation Through Chemistry” book the first law of thermodynamics is tossed aside… because, well, God. Later in the book the second law of thermodynamics is used to throw out evolution… because, well, science.
Only “science” book I’ve ever seen that uses exclamation points and goes 30 pages between illustrations (inclusive of anything interesting: charts, clip art, a picture…).
I’m a secular homeschooler – I homeschool because I have two highly capable kids (oldest graduated high school at 15, is off at university now studying Behavioural Neuroscience) – yet I get lumped in with the idiots who indoctrinate their kids with this dribble. And here we are encouraging it at the state level. The mind boggles.
These people think Africa is a country.
Or maybe they think some of the countries in China are communist, I don’t know.
…and when some of us anti-compulsory education folks claim schooling is a system social engineering to uphold the status quo, everyone acts like its a crazy conspiracy theory. This reality denying bullshit crops up all over, again and again, and the only reason its scary is because telling lies in this fashion actually does work. School is just as effective at teaching lies as it is at teaching the truth. It is a system that discourages critical thought, and makes learning a chore, so the motivation and means to seriously investigate claims is destroyed in most children.
Bobby Jindal, leading the charge to turn the USA into an intellectual backwater and seize the crown as the worlds White Trash laughing stock.
anybody with a brain better emigrate now.
Wow, that thing about the Trail of Tears is so messed up I don’t know where to begin.
Also, seriously, denying star and nuclear fusion? That is one of the most well tested theory in astronomy. But then again, they deny evolution by natural selection, one of the most well tested theory in biology.
Acc. to a quick Wikipedia check, there are only four communist countries left in the world: China, Laos, Cuba, and Vietnam. Even Nth Korea has apparently discarded all Marxist-Leninist references in its constitution and government documents and looks like it should be described now as a hereditary personality cult with a nationalist ideology.
There are two democratic countries with elected communist parties in power (Nepal and Cyprus), and another seven countries in which a communist party is part of a ruling coalition, one of which is South Africa. That’s it.
There were a few African communist countries during the Cold War, but most of those regimes ceased to exist around 1990-92, which I suspect had a lot to do with running out of external support after the Soviet Union collapsed.
@chrislawson
Heck, can one even call China communist? It seems like capitalism but with a horribly authoritarian government.
Heck, can one even call China communist? It seems like capitalism but with a horribly authoritarian government.
Funny, that’s how I’d describe America.
I think this is meant to be a reference to all of the various proxy wars thought between the Soviet Block and the West in that region during the latter half of the 20th Century. So nice to know that bigots are up on current events.
God is inefficient like that.
Is it just me or does Jindal’s policy reeks of White Savior syndrome? He basically says people of color are no good until white Christians came to “aid” them.
Reading this list is too damned surreal. The bit about Africa, though – what a nasty god-bothering bucket of bigoted horse snot. Even just going off the top of my head from the NatGeo Atlas, I know that most of the countries (except those in a state of perpetual war, about 10%) are above 50% literacy, and a third are in the 90% plus range. They read well enough to pay too much attention to Rome; millions of people who have died because of another liar for Jebus, fucking Pope Fritz and his anti-condom crusade. The continent would be doing quite well without having ever seen a single zealot missionary.
Can you say “Lose ianna”? Sure you can.
Yep, A Beka Books. I was subjected to those at various times. Thank god for University!
What is White Savior syndrome. The Tea Party?
BTW, oddly enough, Jindal isn’t technically white.
He was born in the USA to Indian Hindu parents and converted to Catholicism in his teens. IIRC, he is married to another US born Indian.
Hmmm, this isn’t looking good. I suppose it is possible that Jindal doesn’t see anything wrong with setting up a caste system in the USA. Guess who will be in the lower castes and who will be the new Brahmins?
It’s very simple. God lets white people kill thousands of nonwhite people, steal all their land and stuff, and deport them for their own good. This is known as “sophisticated theology”.
Read your damn bible. God helped the Israelites kill all the Canaanites and steal their land, women, and stuff for their own good.
BTW, god could be looking at you right now. How much stuff and land do you have? Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and fuzzy to know you could be killed and all your net worth given to some deserving white christofascist, for your own good?
Raven @ 112
That’s the difference bewteen scientists and politicians. Scientists want to know the results of their experiment. Politicians have no interest in finding out that their experiment failed.
This is why we will never have science-based policy.
That was always my strategy when I used to troll Usenet groups and later blogs for “debates” with perpetual motion nutcases. Give them publicity. Make them be very explicit about explaining their nutty beliefs. Don’t just shine a light on them — use a high-intensity spotlight. Get them to fully publicly and unambiguously commit to a completely absurd position, then carefully explain, fully referenced, that they’re wrong.
Trouble is, an awful lot of the audience watching these “debates” is equally deluded (especially on the Usenet newsgroups and many blogs). It’s a losing battle. Stupidity is an infection. Ignorance can be cured with a bit of education, but stupidity is terminal.
Education is the amoxicillin to ignorance’s E. coli. Exposed to the extreme anti-education stance of a large portion of the right wing, the ignorance has mutated into numerous antibiotic-resistant strains of outright mind-bending stupidity, and the infection is spreading out of control.
We can only hope that the educational system responds by yanking the academic accreditation of Louisiana public schools. Perhaps after a few years of Louisiana kids failing to get into college — any college, Louisiana will rethink their position, stop lying to their students, and start educating them again.
@114 sadunlap
Yeah, we know. I think that it was just a humorous quip at the fact that birds are dinosaurs.
Yeah, I don’t think this will work since it’s a pretty obvious attempt to create an underclass that can’t/won’t go the college. Very common white trash school tactic. Don’t bother to educate the trash, just make sure they understand who the man is so they can wipe up his shit stains. Oh and make sure to have the military bunk down so when the trash graduates, if they don’t want to wipe shit for eternity, instead they can go die for oil subsidies.
What (seriously) worries me is how, exactly, one fights this crap.
It’s like ‘Whack-A-Mole’: as soon as one thinks this multi-headed,religio-political nightmare of a monster is getting beaten back, it pops up elsewhere. It’s like an invasive specie with no natural predators, or zombies in (virtually any) zombie movie: they just keep coming,..and coming,… and coming. There seems no to be no end to this stupidity.
kreativekaos: I would say citizens groups need to get involved. It is difficult to do, however, as it requires a large time (and sometimes money) commitment. I think LA has a ‘Citizens for Science’ group, like FL, KS and others, but I’d have to go google it.
If so, I’d recommend joining, offering to support in any way you can.