Sunday, February 14, 2010

Just says it all, don't it...

(...sigh) Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.

It should be noted that this level of illiterate paste-eating chowderheadedness is not always indicated in home schooling situations. In fact, you'll hear from a number of progressive, atheist parents on the TFN blog who have chosen, wisely, to homeschool because Texas is doing is damnedest to turn public schools here into little Christian houses of indoctrination. If I were a parent, I'd homeschool, absolutely. How else could I be sure my kid was getting a sound grounding in history and science, free from right-wing ideological revisionism? But it's true that a significant amount of homeschooling is done by fundamentalist Christian parents seeking to destroy their kids' minds and future opportunities by entrenching that very ideology. And I think that's what we're seeing the hilarious after-effects of here.

HT: TFN Insider

23 comments:

  1. Though I'm trying to be more constructive and less mean and all...I can't think of any other valid response to this then...
    "DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!"

    ReplyDelete
  2. Since I plan on moving to Austin in a few years, tell me: how dangerous do you think it would be to go to such an event as this holding a sign reading "I'm with stupid" surrounded by arrows?

    ReplyDelete
  3. With reference to "turn public schools here into little Christian houses of indoctrination.", James Madison had the same problem and wrote:

    Memorial and Remonstrance
    Against Religious Assessments
    James Madison
    [1785]

    When confronted, in the General Assembly of Virginia, with “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion," to be paid for by a general assessment by the Commonwealth, Madison “remonstrated” against it for many reasons, one of which was that:

    Any state establishment of a Religion would “foster in those who still reject it, a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits.”

    (Madison’s other reasons are spot on, too)

    Full text at:

    http://religiousfreedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/madison_m&r_1785.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Perhpaps it was intentional? Done in jest, maybe?

    ReplyDelete
  5. My wife went to cAtholic school all her life, and they seemed to have less of a wing-nut attitude than the public schools I went to.

    If/when when have a kid we want to go private. The is a Quaker school here, which we may try as apparently the Quakers believe you can indeed question the existence of a deity. There is only one non-religious private school, but this is the South... ;-)

    I am always wary of home schooling. I don't think a child's first introduction to full-on education should be college. That seems like too much stimulus.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Maybe, the extra "O" wasn't added because the person writing the sign was running out of room. I suppose he or she could've squashed the other remaining letters in order to make room, though.

    ReplyDelete
  7. {required Conservative rejoinder}

    "If I were a parent, I'd homeschool, absolutely. How else could I be sure my kid was getting a sound grounding in history and science, free from right-wing ideological revisionism?"

    Change that last bit to "left-wing ideological revisionism" and you'll identify the (well-founded) fears of many parents who home-schooled their kids over the past few decades.

    {/required Conservative rejoinder}

    On the up side, the illiteracy on display won't prevent the sign-holder from getting a teaching job in pretty much any public high school...

    ReplyDelete
  8. "Change that last bit to "left-wing ideological revisionism" and you'll identify the (well-founded) fears of many parents who home-schooled their kids over the past few decades.'

    Um yeah but they're defining things like say talking about the Japanese interment as 'revisionism'.

    ReplyDelete
  9. George: How does teaching a kid, for instance, accurate evolutionary biology without the taint of ID constitute "left-wing ideological revisionism"? I'll grant you that morons like Don McLeroy think it is. But the way the Texas SBOE is going, they're pretty much taking the attitude that any school curriculum that isn't teaching history lessons like "White Christians did everything awesome!" and "The first president of the US was Jesus!" must be peddling lefty "revisionism." I mean, shit, George, these people want to teach history that suppresses any information about people like Cesar Chavez and throws in cheerleading for Phyllis Schlafly and Rush fucking Limbaugh. Tell me there's not something broken there.

    ReplyDelete
  10. George, the problem is that these people think NOT pushing right wing ideology is pushing left wing ideology.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "The first president of the US was Jesus!"

    Wait... it wasn't?

    ReplyDelete
  12. No, it was Gus the Magic Cosmic Hippo. Get it right!

    ReplyDelete
  13. This is another reminder of an axiom of mine and my sig line on Daily Kos:

    "Liberal bias = failure to sufficiently flatter or validate the conservative narrative on any given topic or issue".

    ReplyDelete
  14. Not that there has not been liberal biases in some classes, I can actually think of a few, but those all occurred at my PRIVATE high-school, and there were teachers pushing conservative agendas as well.

    It may be my bias but I don't think agenda pushing is big in liberal circles due to them being well...more liberal when it comes to tolerating what people believe.

    The problem is that a good deal of conservative views in this day and age are flatly against reality. (WMDs existence, creationism, historical revisionism towards christianity, historical revisionism minimizing racial institutions, historical revisionism warping the view on fascism, birthers, sex ed, etc). The left has some stupid views like this as well (9-11 truthers, Al Queda 'never existed' bs, cultural relativism, over application of post modernism, The secret, etc) But they don't seem to pop up in the class room as much.

    Now to put it in perspective my religion teacher got some complaints that he was teaching a liberal bias. He was teaching the bible...the whole bible.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Kazim, I would have you know that you're "Unbiased rant" blog @ Kazim's Korner has a great deal to do with my dKos sig line.

    ReplyDelete
  16. @Kyle:
    Oh yes? Link to the sig (and the post you meant)?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Russell:

    "An unfair and unbalanced media rant"

    http://kazimskorner.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_archive.html

    And, in Daily Kos, my handle is RockyMtnLib.

    My sig is "liberal bias = failure to validate or sufficiently flatter the conservative narrative on any given subject"

    http://www.dailykos.com/user/RockyMtnLib/prefs/Account%20Info

    ReplyDelete
  18. Well I graduated in 2005 from Texas Public Schools and I didn't learn how Evolution worked until 2007.

    ReplyDelete
  19. "Well I graduated in 2005 from Texas Public Schools and I didn't learn how Evolution worked until 2007."

    I received my bachelor's in 2006. I learned how evolution worked two years later, whilst doing research on becoming an atheist. I understood that it was real, of course, but I had to find out the details on my own. The process wasn't readily available as part of any curriculum in almost 17 years of being educated by the state of Tennessee's public schools and colleges.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Really? I picked up on this at like 7 from my dinosaur books...

    Is education really that worse away from the cost?

    ReplyDelete
  21. Martin,

    Please understand, I do not excuse the likes of McLeroy and the SBOE.

    My point is that this problem - and it's a huge problem - is somewhat trans-ideological. Both sides have tried to turn schoolbooks into pamphlets for their respective worldviews over the years.

    In this case, the nonsense comes from the (Religious-)Right but as a kid growing up in NY state I encountered "history" classes and textbooks so outrageously doctrinally Leftward as to make the SBOE's stunts downright mild in comparison.

    That's history and such. On the bio/science front, the SBOE is wrong wrong wrong and that's all there is to it. :)

    BTW, I know it's tiresome to have me popping in here repeatedly to declare "Hey, the other side does it, too!" when some Republican's or Conservative's misconduct is under discussion. Indeed, it makes me seem more Right-ward than I actually am. One day we must have a proper, extended conversation about Liberalism, Conservatism, tradition, culture, Atheism, religion - perhaps I could make the state of my mind more clear?

    Then again, perhaps nothing could do that. Heh.

    ReplyDelete
  22. @ George

    Examples please? Cause I remember them putting everything up to class debate including "Was it right to genocide Indians?" or "Was the Japanese internment right?" and presenting both sides to that as well as whether we should have forced the south to abolish slavery, and all sorts of wtfness.

    The only one i can maybe remember is 2nd amendment stuff due to 'no guns in schooly' bias.

    ReplyDelete

PLEASE NOTE: The Atheist Experience has moved to a new location, and this blog is now closed to comments. To participate in future discussions, please visit http://www.freethoughtblogs.com/axp.

This blog encourages believers who disagree with us to comment. However, anonymous comments are disallowed to weed out cowardly flamers who hide behind anonymity. Commenters will only be banned when they've demonstrated they're nothing more than trolls whose behavior is intentionally offensive to the blog's readership.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.