Ideology vs. education
Massimo Pigliucci goes to war against public ignorance – sometimes willful – in matters of science in his new book "Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk,” recently released by the University of Chicago Press. He analyzes how the belief in bunk science occurs, looking into how scientists work and spread their knowledge and how the culture absorbs it. Here, Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, turns his sights on a related issue: the way ideology worms its way into public education and elbows aside serious scholarship. His case in point: Texas.
After years of attempting to dilute the teaching of science, the Texas Board of Education has at least temporarily succeeded in rewriting history itself to its liking. According to the newly approved standards in social studies, the United States of America is not a democracy anymore, it’s a constitutional republic (it is actually both), and the somewhat tarnished term “capitalism” (see recent Wall Street shenanigans) has been replaced by the more optimistic and certainly more patriotic sounding “free enterprise system.”
Other changes that Texas students will be exposed to include less emphasis on the civil rights movement and more on the Confederacy, and of course the “truth” that the United Nations is a questionable