So, I’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 is palatable to the bloc.
You can see where this headed, but it’s already shockingly total. Right now, a sex ed textbook that isn’t “abstinence only” cannot be bought 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’t-have-sex strategy in sex ed doesn’t accomplish anything it might be intended to do; it results neither in informed kids nor safe ones .
With education systems being run this way, are the results cited in the “American #1” article (pointed out to me by “Hatfield” Stemple, who saw it at PNH’s blog before I did) a surprise?
- The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
- The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
- Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
- “The International Adult Literacy Survey…found that Americans with less than nine years of education ‘score worse than virtually all of the other countries'” (Jeremy Rifkin’s superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).
- 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!
- “The European Union leads the U.S. in…the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised” (The European Dream, p.70).
- “Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature” (The European Dream, p.70).
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’s tinfoil hat territory I guess, and I don’t expect you all to follow my habits in headgear.
