Wednesday, August 8, 2012

14 Wacky "Facts" Kids Will Learn in Louisiana's Voucher Schools

Mother Jones, with many links and some good graphics.

Thanks to a new law privatizing public education in Louisiana, Bible-based curriculum can now indoctrinate young, pliant minds with the good news of the Lord—all on the state taxpayers' dime.
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Many of these schools, Kopplin notes, rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based "facts," such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience that researcher Rachel Tabachnick and writer Thomas Vinciguerra have thankfully pored over so the rest of world doesn't have to.

And Bob Jones U too, motherbobjoneser. That's the ticket to catch back up to the rest of the world in education. Yeesh. Hold your nose:

6. The KKK was A-OK: "[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. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians."—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

7. The Great Depression wasn't as bad as the liberals made it sound: "Perhaps the best known work of propaganda to come from the Depression was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath…Other forms of propaganda included rumors of mortgage foreclosures, mass evictions, and hunger riots and exaggerated statistics representing the number of unemployed and homeless people in America."—United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed., A Beka Book, 1996


The Rude Pundit, a native of Louisiana, weighs in on this horseshit:

Yes, education in Louisiana is fucked beyond fucked. There's Delhi Charter School, which is finally getting sued for its seven year-old policy of forcing female students to take pregnancy tests and then making pregnant students receive schooling at home. There's the insanity that's being taught at the many evangelical schools that have received state money. So your child can learn such useful information as "But instead of this world unification ushering in an age of prosperity and peace, as most globalists believe it will, it will be a time of unimaginable human suffering as recorded in God's Word. The Anti-christ will tightly regulate who may buy and sell."
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A couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney praised Jindal's edumacation policies; he has said they are models for the rest of the nation. When the Rude Pundit was home in Louisiana, he mentioned that he thought that Jindal would be Romney's vice-president nominee. "Romney can have him," said a Republican relative, who had voted twice for Jindal. "He's ruining this state."

I like Louisiana. I like its music, its food, its folks (mostly), and its culture. I even watch Cajun Justice which is very good-natured for a cop show and fuckin' hilarious! Especially when they're chasing down a rougarou or finding an obeah woman to remove a voodoo curse put on 'em by some drunk they arrested. Heh.

Louisiana has been taking it in the shorts for years. Goobernor Bobby "Little Creep" Jindal, following the Louisiana tradition of horrendously corrupt and inept governance, is leading the charge in the state-by-state Repug "Wreck America For The 1%" program by dumbing down education so Americans will be grateful to their Masters for menial jobs at Chinese wages.

One state down, 49 to go.

2 comments:

BadTux said...

To be fair, that's always pretty much described Louisiana -- i.e., a corrupt low-wage banana republic where the aristocrats who run the place do their best to dumb down the schools as much as possible (because their *own* children, of course, go to elite private schools or "special" magnet schools) 'cause if they keep'em dumb and stupid, they can keep fooling most of the people most of the time and keep running the state. Huey Long broke the power of the aristocrats for a while during the 1930's, and Edwin Edwards fought a holding action for a good while longer during the 1970's (which is why they had to track him down THIRTY YEARS LATER and put his geriatric self in jail, that was revenge, pure and simple), but now they're back, and they're back to the same old sh*t they've always been up to.

- Badtux the Former Louisiana Penguin

Fixer said...

... 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.

Directly out of the Hizbullah/Hamas playbook.