D’Oh! That Smarts! High School Kids Finds Flaws In College Textbook

“I just realized from my own knowledge that some of this stuff in the book is just plain wrong,” said LaClair, who is using the book as part of an AP government class at Kearny High School.

The most glaring thing about the book in question, “American Government”, is not the fact that topics including global warming and the separation of church and state were “skewed”. It’s not even the fact that it turns out that the kid was right about all the “errors” and what amounts to evidence of political bias, in the book (which was written by a couple of conservatives). It’s the fact that one of the book’s illustrious authors, John Dilulio, used to be the Director of Faith-based Initiatives, for the Bush administration.

Now, I’ll be the first to tell you that occasionally every once in a while rarely a conservative and even a former member of the Bush administration has come out with a book that was worth reading. But, didn’t anyone (namely a grown-up, an actual professor, even) vet this book for errors before passing it off as a book suitable for any educational purposes, much less a college education (or AP education, in this case), especially in light of the fact that Bush has shown a proclivity for cronyism and not so much shown that he honestly knows how to pick smart people to work for him (”Brownie”, anyone)?

crossposted: Hypocrisy.com

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SEXUALLY SEGREGATED EDUCATION: NOT!

As the mother of two daughters I must admit that there was a time when I was intrigued by the idea of separating boys and girls in our school classrooms. The idea, at the time, was that our first daughter would receive a high quality education without the unruly influence of high-spirited young men in the classroom, who might interfere with the educational process. In November, my husband (Enlightenment, PraetorOne’s father) and I had a beautiful menopause baby, a girl who we named Allison and the topic of Sexually Segregated Education was again brought to the front burner. Only this time I was dead set against it.Why?

Because for all intents and purposes Sexually Segregated Education is just that, a form of segregation and it is not being proposed because the people who created and who are currently promoting this movement think a great deal of women. Indeed I see a lot of self-hating women, and woman-hating men who are using pseudo science and over-generalizations to promote a very misogynistic agenda.

One proponent of segregation is Charlotte Allen of the Independent Women’s Form, who writes;

“The theory that women are the dumber sex…is amply supported by neurological and standardized testing. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s ( even after adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuoptical skills, the capacity to rotate three dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy.”

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It’s more important now: The world we want for our child

Donatra and PraetorOne had a lovely baby boy this winter. They have named him after BibleBelted, their dearest friend who is also currently undergoing Chemo for inoperable cancer. Love and hugs to all four of them~Dusty

By Donatra and PraetorOne

Having a baby can change one’s perspectives in ways that one never would have suspected. Throughout the summer, fall, and winter we knew that we did not want our child to be raised in the Republican cuckoo land that has become the United States, and now that our child, a healthy baby boy named Jeffrey Michael, has arrived in the world we are more determined than ever to turn this country around while there is still a country left to actually turn around. I don’t know if any of you out there are new or expecting parents, but as far as my husband, PraetorOne, and I are concerned we are even more dedicated to changing this country than we were during the run up to January 13th, the day that our first child was born.

So what do we want? That is a loaded question.

First and foremost we want to see an end to the war in Iraq–as quickly as possible. Thanks to George W. Bush we are now stuck in this quagmire and if John McCain has a say in the matter we’ll be there for at least another decade or two with even more American involvement. That is not a thrilling prospect. I suspect that on some level, McCain, who is well known for his occasional outbursts of temper, is STILL bitter about the time he spent as a POW during the Vietnam War; and far from making him more sympathetic to the horrors of war, I suspect that he believes on some level that since HE had to suffer that OTHER young men and women might as well suffer too. In other words, we need a Democrat in the Whitehouse who will do more than issue half-baked platitudes about how much he or she supports the troops. We need a Democrat in office who will support the troops so much that he or she is willing to stop the open bleeding and bring them home right now.

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