Bruce Wilson, writing on the blog Talk to Action gives a very disturbing look at the textbooks typically used in many fundamentalist Christian schools around the country. Loaded with blatently racist lies, such as stating that the KKK acted as some kind of Christian benevolent organization, or that the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists like John Steinbeck, these books not only provide the only resource for education for millions of American children across the country, in many states they also are funded by the tax payers.
New Hampshire residents need to pay attention to this issue as the extremist right-wing faction in the state house would like nothing better than to take public tax dollars and funnel them into parochial schools. Using dubious claims and even outright misinformation about Common Core, the fundamentalist right wing, funded oddly enough by large corporate and political players, attempt to cast doubt into the public’s mind about the quality of public education.
This look into the textbooks used by these religious schools demonstrates the reason why corporate interests love the malleable and unregulated industry of parochial schools; they can serve as the breeding ground for a compliant, uninformed and ignorant future population to exploit.
Nessie a Plesiosaur? Louisiana To Fund Schools Using Odd, Bigoted Fundamentalist Textbooks
“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.” – from Bob Jones University Press American history textbook
This 2012-2013 school year, thanks to a bill pushed through by governor Bobby Jindal, thousands of students in Louisiana will receive state voucher money, transferred from public school funding, to attend private religious schools, some of which teach from a Christian curriculum that suggests the Loch Ness Monster disproves evolution and states that the alleged creature, which has never been demonstrated to even exist, has been tracked by submarine and is probably a plesiosaur. The curriculum also claims that a Japanese fishing boat caught a dinosaur.
On the list of schools approved to receive funding through the new voucher funding, that critics warn could eventually cut public school funding in half, are schools that teach from the Christian fundamentalist A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education curriculum.What’s in that curriculum? Last year, researcher Rachel Tabachnick and I co-produced a 35-minute documentary on the spread of a similar voucher program in Pennsylvania and other US states, titled “School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias”. Embedded at the end of this post is an eight-minute video segment from that documentary with scans from material in currently used A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press texts (in this May 25, 2011 story Tabachnick provides quotes from those textbooks.)
Continue reading: Nessie a Plesiosaur?
Progressive Action New Hampshire 