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Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Texas School Book Repository - Roger Ebert's Journal

The Texas School Book Repository - Roger Ebert's Journal

The Texas School Book Repository


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       thomas.jpgDo the schoolbook publishers of America have standards? Courage? Ethics? In what sense do they stand behind their product? For "product" they sometimes produce, and not textbooks in the traditional sense. I ask these questions for a reason.

Right-wingers from Texas will be deciding what will be added and taken out of the textbooks of America's school children. They form the majority of the 15-member Texas State Board of Education. They believe current textbooks are slanted toward a liberal viewpoint, and that discussion of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which one member describes as "hooey," wrongly excludes a consideration of Creationism.
"Teaching the controversy" about Evolution versus Creationism is of course the Wedge Strategy of the Discovery Institute, a fundamentalist think tank in Dallas. Having failed in the courts to get Creationism into schools as a legitimate area of science, they created a "controversy" about the most thoroughly confirmed theory in the history of science. Now the Texas Schoolbookers are using the strategy to make openings for