{"id":190,"date":"2005-04-09T23:49:34","date_gmt":"2005-04-10T03:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/04\/09\/hump-of-hate-texas-textbooks\/"},"modified":"2005-04-09T23:49:54","modified_gmt":"2005-04-10T03:49:54","slug":"hump-of-hate-texas-textbooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/09\/hump-of-hate-texas-textbooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Hump Of Hate: Texas Textbooks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, I&#8217;ve talked a lot about textbooks, primarily about the religously-motivated alterations of their content; most recently it was the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2005\/03\/22\/deus-vult\/\">homophobic alterations of Texas texts<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Now I read in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ambiguous.org\/archive.php3\/2005\/03\/24#robin2005324.1\">post at Ambiguous.org<\/a> that because a number of Southern states buy their texts as a bloc, lead by Texas, that the national publishers are self-censoring their content so that it is palatable to the bloc.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n You can see where this headed, but it&#8217;s already shockingly total. Right now, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.metroland.net\/back_issues\/vol28_no12\/features.html\"> a sex ed textbook that isn&#8217;t &#8220;abstinence only&#8221; cannot be bought <\/a> in the United States. Not a current one, not from any major publisher. There are inroads against evolution as well, but sex ed has basically been exterminated. Again, the don&#8217;t-have-sex strategy in sex ed doesn&#8217;t accomplish anything it might be intended to do; it results neither in <a href=\"http:\/\/changeseverything.blogspot.com\/2005\/03\/we-need-army-of-guerrilla-sex-ed.html\"> informed kids <\/a>  nor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncac.org\/issues\/abstinenceonly.html\"> safe ones <\/a> .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>With education systems being run this way, are the results cited in the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.citypages.com\/databank\/26\/1264\/article12985.asp\">American #1<\/a>&#8221; article (pointed out to me by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adamstemple.com\/Ink%20Blot\/blog\/archives\/2005\/03\/thats_it_im_mov.html\">&#8220;Hatfield&#8221; Stemple<\/a>, who saw it at <a href=\"http:\/\/nielsenhayden.com\/electrolite\/\">PNH&#8217;s blog<\/a> before I did) a surprise?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).<\/li>\n<li>The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).<\/li>\n<li>Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (<i>The Week<\/i>, Jan. 7, 2005).<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The International Adult Literacy Survey&#8230;found that Americans with less than nine years of education &#8216;score worse than virtually all of the other countries'&#8221; (Jeremy Rifkin&#8217;s superbly documented book <i>The European Dream: How Europe&#8217;s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream<\/i>, p.78).<\/li>\n<li>Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;The European Union leads the U.S. in&#8230;the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&amp;D) expenditures; and new capital raised&#8221; (<i>The European Dream<\/i>, p.70).<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature&#8221; (<i>The European Dream<\/i>, p.70).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It also follows that an education system that produces graduates who are weak in critical thinking and logic, also produces citizens that are more easily manipulated. But that&#8217;s tinfoil hat territory I guess, and I don&#8217;t expect you all to follow my habits in headgear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p class=\"excerpt\">So, I&#8217;ve talked a lot about textbooks, primarily about the religously-motivated alterations of their content; most recently it was the homophobic alterations of Texas texts. Now I read in a post at Ambiguous.org that because a number of Southern states buy their texts as a bloc, lead by Texas, that the national publishers are self-censoring their content so that it&hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/2005\/04\/09\/hump-of-hate-texas-textbooks\/\">Read more &rarr;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-head-explodes","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-34","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}