As was foretold, we've added advertisements to the forums! If you have questions, or if you encounter any bugs, please visit this thread: https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/240191/forum-advertisement-faq-and-reports-thread/
Options
Do We Need National [Education] Curriculums Yet?
Cognisseur
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I thought that the horribly stupid Evolution vs. Intelligent Design debates that raged on a few years back were an isolated instance of our education system being perverted by idiots, but apparently not.
Texas is in the middle of establishing their Social Studies curriculum right now, and it's getting blogged:
None of these are particularly earth-shattering, but each is another example of the education system being eroded for one reason or another. It boggles my mind that 15 people get together in a room and decide what an entire generation of children believes. For that matter, they're not even a particularly bright bunch of 15 people. They seem to be comprised primarily of anti-intellectual partisan hacks.
Should anything be done about this sort of stuff? How long before every history curriculum is about how Reagan and Jesus teamed up to save us from the dinosaur-riding communists during the civil war of 1776?
Texas is in the middle of establishing their Social Studies curriculum right now, and it's getting blogged:
11:21 – Board member Barbara Cargill wants to insert a discussion of the right to bear arms in a standard that focuses on First Amendment rights and the expression of various points of view. It passes.
11:59 – Board member Ken Mercer suggests this standard: “understand how government taxation and regulations can serve as restrictions to private enterprise.” Bob Craig points out that the amendment is misplaced. It is — the section in which it would be inserted deals with government policies on “science, technology and society,” not “private enterprise.” Mercer moves his movement to a section on the economy. It passes.
12:04 – The current standards draft currently refer to the economic system that exists in the United States as “free enterprise (capitalist, free market).” Mercer offers an amendment to strike out “(capitalist, free market)” in the standards and leave just “free enterprise.” The board’s far-right members have repeatedly complained (absurd) that “capitalism” is a negative term and, in any case, that state statute requires students to learn about the “free enterprise system.” Scholars on the curriculum teams had argued that “capitalism” and “free market” are commonly used terms in economics courses and everyday discourse. Terri Leo: “I do think words mean things. . . . I see no reason, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia.” It passes.
12:28 – Board member Mavis Knight offers the following amendment: “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” Knight points out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state.
12:32 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar argues that the Founders didn’t intend for separation of church and state in America. And she’s off on a long lecture about why the Founders intended to promote religion. She calls this amendment “not historically accurate.”
12:35 – Knight’s amendment fails.
None of these are particularly earth-shattering, but each is another example of the education system being eroded for one reason or another. It boggles my mind that 15 people get together in a room and decide what an entire generation of children believes. For that matter, they're not even a particularly bright bunch of 15 people. They seem to be comprised primarily of anti-intellectual partisan hacks.
Should anything be done about this sort of stuff? How long before every history curriculum is about how Reagan and Jesus teamed up to save us from the dinosaur-riding communists during the civil war of 1776?
Cognisseur on
0
Posts
The governor picks one head honcho, and the honcho picks the rest, going by wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Education_Agency#State_Board_of_Education
EDIT:
This Cynthia Dunbar is a maniac! Houston, what are you thinking?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Dunbar
On the other hand, who's to say that the people setting the national curricula will not introduce stupid bullshit that must be followed on a national level? I suspect we'd wind up improving things in backwards areas and hurting things in the places that currently do well. If that's the case, then fuck it, let the dumbasses muck up their own curricula and let the non-dumbfucks operate in peace.
*Roughly every 5 hours.
The problem, Jeffe, is that it's expensive to print textbooks to fit the criteria for every state, so what frequently happens is the textbook manufactures cater to the largest state with the craziest standards, so the fucknuts in Texas (or California) get to dictate to the rest of the nation.
Oh Jesus, a lady actually convinced them that separation of church and state isn't historically accurate.
I've read before that Texas has some sort of foothold in determining what shows up in text books for the entire nation. This is disastrous.
Simple: federal government says: hey states, do _____, or we're not giving you the money we promised for _____. The second doesn't have to be related to the first in any way other than tangentially.
For example: Congress never passed a national drinking age statute. But they told the states that if they didn't raise it to 21, no more highway funding for them, losers.
In NCLB's case, I believe the stick was funding for learning disabled students went poof if they didn't meet the new federal standards.
I may have to agree with this. It's not like a reagan or bush curriculum would be very pretty.
Oops did I call out a region outloud?
People should check this out. Good article about this very subject I read a few weeks ago.
Basically, school curricula are set at the state level. Texas is the second-largest state, and California's standards are too strict for the bulk of states to accept...so basically Texas is it. Really there are only two ways around this.
One, we set national curricula. I dislike this idea, because what would end up happening is the dumbasses in Texas and Alabama would just team up with the fuckheads in rural...well, every other state and steamroll the process...we'd wind up with the same bullshit.
Two, a few states bite the bullet and work together to set a regional curricula. Basically, another equally (or more) populous region needs to give up their individual curricula and work together to create a textbook market to rival that of CA and TX...then they need to make sure their curricula is politically moderate enough to be palatable across most of the nation. Yeah, it might not be perfect, but the idea I have is that New England as a whole could definitely come up with something better than Texas, regardless of how many rural areas there are up there.
Now, all this guarantees is competition. If New England refuses to buy TX-approved textbooks, it's a large enough market to warrant its own. Then, states outside New England (like Washington) would have the option of choosing between the two. Yes, Wyoming and Alabama might still buy the Texas books, what with their chapters devoted to the "War of Northern Aggression" and "How Much Did George Washington Hate Gays, Anyway?" But this seems like it would be better than the status quo, and probably manage to put more non-retarded textbooks into the hands of more students than either a national plan or what we have now.
Unfortunately, moving from one state to another doesn't take much work, so people from the south will move to more progressive states and drag them down while well-educated people move to the south and help them out.
Feel free to add me on whatever network, it's always more fun to play with people than alone
I sort of agree with ElJeffe*, but man this shit still bothers me.
edit: *on the other hand, Cognisseur makes a good point.
On the one hand, I think "yeah, fuck 'em, let them fester in their own filth". But on the other hand, festering in filth just begets more filth, and gradually it takes up a higher and higher percentage of the population.
Before you know it, you'll have people running for national offices who are completely incompetent, and basically set their platform to be "I hate everything intellectual and researched. My Jesus-Sense will be my decision-maker."
No, wait, that's where we are right now. And that's precisely the problem. By allowing this erosion of education and general anti-intellectualism to continue, it really just does a lot of harm to the way we are able to run this country. Giving up on them, as appealing as it sounds, will just really come back to fuck us, as it's already starting to do.
I was just thinking why say, the Great Lakes states didn't do such a thing. Get some Big Ten professors together and write some textbooks.
So keep the whole governmental structure out of education entirely and just let the teachers / professors critique one another.
Fund it. That's the problem. I think local control is ideal for school, so you put things at the school board level. The problem is that poor areas have nowhere near the funding to provide a quality education while rich areas (in this case, my middle school) are giving away free laptops in 1997. So then the state gets involved and shit gets fucked up and inevitably when an economic downturn happens, the state cuts all education funding and everybody's screwed! Woo! Well, mostly Michigan is screwed.
I personally think that the local school board system is pretty horrible in some cases, but having Congress directly involved would be much, much worse.
Why could it not be funded as it is funded, but teachers / professors regulate the class material?
Err... did you read the OP? The problem is that the state lawmakers are getting away with it and are acting partisan as hell. Throwing in a discussion specifically about how taxation hurts businesses? What is that if not the embodiment of partisan-BS?
A common sentiment I hear is "well fine, fuck 'em then, let them destroy themselves if they keep electing those sort of people to their board of education". Although the whole notion of 'getting what you deserve' is appealing, it's not actually beneficial to anyone. The states that keep electing idiots end up setting up curriculams that guarantee the next generation will (continue to) be too dumb to not elect those sort of people. And even if you live in a state that doesn't have that problem, you still have to deal with that level of idiocy every time national elections come along, or any national issue really.
Simply put, it's not good to have these people fucking up education, and leaving it in the states' hands doesn't appear to create the necessary 'accountability'.
Think you can get politicians to give it money without having a say in the curriculum?
I'm increasingly becoming very disappointed and preterbed with my State.
What should academia have to do with academics?
Really Texas?
The best part about that is this:
And then there is making the word "democracy" verbotten, because we aren't a democracy we are a republic. These words are not mutually exclusive and describe two different aspects of how the government works.
Normally I find references to Orwell to be trite and overused, but we've always been at war with Eastasia.
I'm glad St. Patrick's Day is upon us so I have an excuse to begin my descent into alcoholism.
What...the...fuck?
Well okay I don't actually know the process.
Yeah, unfortunately there's a pretty big difference between teaching that there is no separation of church and state and actually forcing religion on somebody. There's really no lawsuit there.
Give teachers more credit than this. We know what stupid is.
The marketplace of ideas will dictate what is permitted to be taught to students more so than what politicians want. However, if that's what the marketplace of ideas will bear in TX then so be it...grats on a retarded state.
That's the thing. We do have a 'national curriculum' at the moment. It's just de-facto and coming out of Texas instead of de-jure and based on DoEd standards. So I guess the question in terms of whether or not the Feds should get involved is would you be more frightened of Bush/Reagan's Secretary of Education influencing the textbook industry until another Democrat gets into office, or Texas' setup?
Though really the best solution seems like it would be the notion others have suggested of having regions step up and come up with actually sane textbook guidelines that would compete with Texas' and potentially have University admissions be impacted by what State standards require. There doesn't really seem to be much of a reason that the Big Ten states couldn't agree to use whatever standards/suggestions are made by various panels composed of Big Ten professors in the relevant fields. Same with New England/the North East and maybe relying on the Ivies and MIT et. al. to come up with their requirements. I wonder what it would take to get such an idea off the ground; because, seriously, this is fucked up.
Actually, no. What politicians want to be printed is what will be printed because they are the ones with the purse strings. Teachers may well decide to not use the textbook all that much in class because it sucks, but they won't manage to just use a different text because where the hell are they going to get the funds for a special run of non-insane prints? The result is rather restrictive.
SSUSH3 The student will explain the primary causes of the American Revolution.
a. Explain how the end of Anglo-French imperial competition as seen in the French and Indian War and the 1763 Treaty of Paris laid the groundwork for the American Revolution.
b. Explain colonial response to such British actions as the Proclamation of 1763, the Stamp Act, and the Intolerable Acts as seen in Sons and Daughters of Liberty and Committees of Correspondence.
c. Explain the importance of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to the movement for independence.
BAM that's it. That's the standard for the ENTIRE revolutionary war. Very basic, this lets the teacher teach what they want.