Texas Narrowly Rejects Allowing Academics To Fact-Check Public School Textbooks (csmonitor.com) 337
jriding writes with news that in a 8-7 vote the Texas State Board of Education rejected a plan to create a group of state university professors to fact-check textbooks approved for the state's 5.2 million public-school students. The CS Monitor reports: "The Board of Education approves textbooks in the nation's second-largest state and stood by its vetting process — despite a Houston-area mother recently complaining that a world geography book used by her son's ninth grade class referred to African slaves as 'workers.' The publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, apologized and moved to make immediate edits."
In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot ownership overwhelmingly rejects having article summaries proofread.
"Texa"...Give me a break.
Failed (Score:2)
They obviously failed their spelling class in "Texa".
Scewed by the reviewer. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Scewed by the reviewer. (Score:5, Informative)
They're all partly true, and partly incorrect, as each only tells part of a larger story.
-The USA cited British impressment of sailors, interference in trade, and other such provocations by Britain, as part of its declaration of war. To a degree, this is true from the American viewpoint at the time (the British didn't see it that way of course), as many Americans felt that way.
-One of the other goals stated by pro-war American politicians at the time was the annexation of Canada (they thought the Canadians would, to borrow a more recent phrase, "greet them as liberators"). During the course of the war, the USA tried to invade Canada on several occasions, only to meet with failure. Thus, it's certainly reasonable for Canadians to have seen things that way.
-The war took place during the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, in which Britain was the leader of the anti-Napoleon coalition (having been the only one to remain at war the entire time). Several of the major reasons cited for the war arose from British actions against France, such as blocking trade, impressment of sailors, and so forth, so it's certainly fair to view the war as part of the Napoleonic Wars. That said, the USA did not ally with France, nor was its conclusion tied to that of the war against Napoleon, and the USA and France did not assist or cooperate with each other in any military ventures during the conflict.
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The 'facts' are not always truth, and the reviewers have their own bias. Here is a great example, the War of 1812. In the US they teach how England was the belligerent and that it was a war between the US and England, defending the US from England. In Canada, they teach that the US was the aggressor. In other parts of the world they teach that the US sided with Napoleon and include the war as part of the Napoleonic wars. Which is truth?
All of the above?
Fer sure (Score:5, Funny)
Whah, hail no!!! We don' want none o' them smarty pants egghead perfessers and braniacs messing' with our beloved holy sacred bullshit stories, or where will it end?
Purty soon lil' Johnny and Janey won't be believin' that this here Earth is flat an' was given to us personally by Jebus Christ hisself!!
And the so-called "slaves", they wuzn't slaves, they wuz "involuntary happy helpers" who got free food and shelter!
Not only that, but mah ancestors hunted dinosaurs with a flintlock way back when, it sez so in mah Holy Book, Not that OTHER filthy dirty lyin' FAKE "holy book" that those differnt' lookin' peeple read from, 'cuz they's all goin' ta' HAIL when they die, yes siree, mah pappy done tol' me so.
Surely You're Joking (Score:5, Insightful)
He recounts when he was on such a committee and was unable to get a criticism in edgewise.
Now, add some religion, politics and general bureaucratic incompetence to that and what you end up with is an all but worthless textbook and a keen hope for a teacher that can teach around it.
Meh. My kids are grown and gone. I wish them luck.
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Meh. My kids are grown and gone. I wish them luck.
My kids are not grown. We homeschool them.
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Isn't that in "What do you care what other people think?" ?
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My grade 8 science teacher laid Bernoulli on us. The 4 vectors, lift, weight, thrust drag all balanced. I asked her how an airplane can fly upside down. She had no clue.
Feynmann (Score:5, Insightful)
Who chose the word "worker"? (Score:2)
I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
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I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
I'd be interested in knowing if they referred to them only as workers, or if they were first referred to as slaves, because slaves are workers and it's only disingenuous to use that word someplace in your copy if you don't first point out that they are in slavery. Sometimes a job is done by both slaves and employed workers, and both of those classes of people are workers. Of course, this being Texas, it was probably wholly inappropriate, but I'd still like to see the offending copy.
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Probably someone who wanted to make a point about slavery and the issue of labor supply and demand in the colonies, something that is important and relevant in US history. It's not like they were trying to hide that these were slaves, since they were actually clear in the same sentence that these "workers" were brought in by the "Slave Trade".
A bigger question is wh
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I'd be interested to know who actually chose to use the word "worker." Was it the author or the editor and what is their ideological proclivity?
Hard to say, but given that the word 'slaves' was already used previously in the sentence, best practice in English writing is not to use the word again, but to use another similar word.
Doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to realize how politicized and religiously bent the texas government is. Any vetting group would be made up of specifically hand-picked individuals who would meet certain religious and political views. It would be about as academic as the Westboro Baptist Church.
State of Education (Score:4, Informative)
yeah, they do need fact checking (Score:5, Informative)
There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.
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Sell Texas to Mexico (Score:2)
Right. Because of that... (Score:2)
..., and because public internet exists for two decades now, there are no stupid or even wrong text books left in the world. Oh wait.
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2. Where I live, the public schools are better than many of the private alternatives. I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
If you can afford the top tier private schools, your child will do fine. But, most families cannot afford the equiva
Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it me or are do others here think the next 20 years in the US is going to be an extremely rough ride? In less than 10 years we will have to deal with kids who grew up with these textbooks in our college system. In another 10 years they will start to become our "leaders". in 40 years they will be in the Senate and House making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there.
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"making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there."
I doubt it. Thats a pretty high hurdle.
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Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:5, Interesting)
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein
Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what your parents said.
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This is what your parents said.
To be fair, we then ended up with Bush. So they weren't entirely wrong......
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Judging from the current activities on Campus today, in 20 years there will no longer be any Higher Education. Just indoctrination camps where people are sent to learn their place.
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And it will be worth every cent!
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Well, while technically correct, there's a slight difference between "someone else is paying for it" and "everyone chipping in a bit" to pay for something everyone profits from but would be too expensive otherwise.
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Well, while technically correct, there's a slight difference between "someone else is paying for it" and "everyone chipping in a bit" to pay for something everyone profits from but would be too expensive otherwise.
Why would it be too expensive otherwise? What monumental earth shattering improvements have we made that have taken college from being a $5,000 a year investment to being instead a $25,000 a year investment in the last 20 years? Instead of making everybody cough up to keep feeding the pig that has grown too large, why don't we instead figure out where all the money is going and stop the waste?
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In another 10 years they will start to become our "leaders". in 40 years they will be in the Senate and House making even worse informed decisions than the morons currently there.
Don't worry. The current "leaders" are still making enough to send their kids to some "proper" schools. And tuition fees are high enough to keep anyone else out. And with textbooks like that, it's only making sure that no "mudbloods" can get into those circles by academic merits.Like the aristocracy of old, they prefer to stay among themselves.
Look at the presidential candidates: A few clans are already trying to turn the US into a family business!
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I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
The reality is that there are a few really good private schools that most middle-class families can't afford (unless your child is exceptional, can demonstrate it on paper, and would be considered an asset to the school to offset the rich-but-dumb kids), and a whole lot
Not just money (Score:2)
Re:Not just money (Score:5, Insightful)
And with the Charter schools it becomes a vicious cycle.
1. Charter school takes public school money.
2. Charter school only takes in "good" students (e.g. not kids with low grades or with difficulties that would require extra assistance).
3. Students with "difficulties" are left in the public schools who have less money to help them.
4. Charter schools get better test scores than public schools. (Since they get to pick and choose not only what students they take but what test results they publish.)
5. Businesses that run charter schools profit and donate money to politicians.
6. Politicians call for more charter schools and to close public schools.
7. Repeat 1 - 6.
Unfortunately, we're seeing this in action in NY and it's not pretty.
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Except, with today's climate in academia, this isn't as black and white an issue as it once was. Sure, no one wants a bunch of bible-thumpers cutting evolution out of a textbook. But what about more controversial issues? Should heavily pro-AGW academics be allowed to remove any references to critics of anthropogenic climate change? Should the Women's Studies chair sitting on the panel be allowed to change the term "history" to "herstory"? Should heavily radicalized academics be allowed to edit a Health Stud
Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:4, Insightful)
So ... er... your example of a "controversial" issue is one about which no scientific controversy whatsoever exist ?
The only *controversy* is between science and fossil fuel companies and is about as legitimate as the one that used to exist between science and tobacco sellers and between science and lead sellers. In fact - we have physical proof now that the fossil fuel companies don't even doubt AGW themselves ! They say they do in public, but internally they trust it so absolutely that they based their schedules for arctic drilling on when ice melt would make it most profitable !
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Number one, there is a controversy. I know you think only famous cosmologists, mechanical engineers who used to host science shows for kids, and the fossil fuel companies count. But there are actual CLIMATE SCIENTISTS who have doubts, not to mention a large potion of the public.
Second, unless you're a fan of damnatio memorae, controversies should be mentioned even if they were wrong. You know, like aether theories, eugenics, phrenology, bloodletting...
Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:5, Insightful)
That's Antarctic sea ice - other end of the world. And the increase is only 1/3 the area of the ice lost in the Arctic. And note that's *area*, not *volume*. Old sea ice tends to get very thick over the decades, young sea ice, not so much. And I would guess that the increase in Antarctic sea ice is related to the ongoing melting of the continental ice sheet - as fresh water flows out to sea the surface water is becoming much less salty and thus freezes at warmer temperatures. (fresh water floats on salt water, and salt lowers the freezing point - that's why they salt roads to remove ice,).
Nobody claims that global warming will be uniform, in fact it's expected that some areas will get colder as weather patterns change. As will transient cold spells such as the polar vortex related freezes we've been having lately.
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you just have to accept that at this point, climate change denial is simply a religion.
Says the Pope!
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No, in fact what "global warming" mostly does is warm up cold place and cause more precipitation in dry place, while changing the already warm places much less. At the peak of the Eocene, the entire globe was covered with vegetation at any latitude, with tropical and subtropical vegetation far into Northern Europe. That's not exactly the "scorched earth" picture we always get with global warming articles.
The terms "global warming" and the use of global avera
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That's quite possibly true in terms of what a new equilibrium would look like (though the planet has been covered by deserts plenty of times as well), but completely ignores the centuries of transition - such small timescales are effectively invisible in the geologic record, but surviving them with civilization intact will likely be far more expensive than avoiding them would be.
And during the transition deserts will be likely without extensive human intervention - the existing vegetation can't migrate fast
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There is little to support that assertion. The IPCC doesn't predict that. There is no evidence for it geologically. And it frankly doesn't make sense, given that the projected climate change isn't all that much faster than what we have already experienced and that people adapt to
Re:If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually there is - pretty much every major climate shift has been accompanied by large extinction events. Just because the regional climate is becoming more hospitable to some life, doesn't mean the existing life isn't dying off, or that the new life it's becoming more conductive to can get there right away.
Sure, the tropics may eventually extend to the poles, but tropical vegetation can only spread by so many yards per year, and in the mean time the existing vegetation is dying off. The effect is even more pronounced for relatively isolated ecosystems such as high mountains. The plants and animals that call them home generally aren't well suited to crossing plains, so as their ecosystem warms they die off, without the ability to move to more polar latitudes. Similarly the low-altitude Amazon Rainforest ecosystem is unlikely to be able to traverse the mountainous chokepoints of Central America - the organisms simply aren't evolved for mountainous living or high altitudes. Some plants will make the leap it in migratory bird droppings, but whether they can survive without the supporting ecosystem they evolved for is an open question.
As for the speed of climate change, yes it IS much faster than anything mankind has experience in thousands of years. At least on a large scale - you can't honestly compare small high-speed changes with large changes that require ecosystems to move thousands of miles to adapt. And if you're comparing the climate adaptability of migratory hunter-gatherers to that of an industrialized society, then perhaps you need to check your assumptions.
And where deserts are concerned, yes, if rainfall increases immediately they should benefit. But you need vegetation, especially trees, immediately upwind to make that a safe assumption - otherwise the increased heat will tend to kill off the borderline vegetation, while the moisture simply passes overhead until it does encounter enough organic volatiles to trigger cloud formation (this is actually a major issue in southern India, where large-scale deforestation has resulted in increasing desertification of the downwind coasts. Meanwhile man-made ecological reserves within the dead zone have led to much increased rainfall downwind.)
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Should heavily pro-AGW academics be allowed to remove any references to critics of anthropogenic climate change?
Um ... yes?
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Right, there's a global conspiracy to create a hoax about something that any high school student can verify with a prism and thermometer (or any college student with access to a proper spectrometer). And FYI it's carbon dioxide that has a strong infrared absorption line. Different molecular compounds have different optical characteristics. Consider that both coal and diamond are pure carbon, but their difference in molecular structure gives them radically different properties.
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And jet fuel can't melt steel beams.
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Of course not. You have to set it on fire first. A kerosene blowtorch will happily heat steel to about 1500 F. It won't actually melt, but it will be glowing cherry red, and bend like toffee.
Re: If you don't like the textbooks, (Score:2)
Its not a scientific debate unless the critics argument is science, backed by evidence. There is no scientific debate about this because the theory has a megafuckton of supporting evidence from virtually every hard science practised by mankind and the deniers have not a shred of evidence whatsoever. Hell most of their arguments are not even coherent. When you confuse artic with antarctic all you prove is that you dont even know preschool level geography.
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Its not a scientific debate unless the critics argument is science, backed by evidence.
It's also not scientific debate if one side has created an unfalsifiable hypothesis and alters any contradictory data until it supports said hypothesis.
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It's simple when you have that privilege available to you.
You're yet another person who is selfish or who can't imagine anything outside of his/her own life.
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He pointed out taking the dollars with the child to pay for an alternative school, something many places do ready.
This is fought tooth and nail by big teacher union big government types to like to spout memes like hey you selfish jerk with privilege...! >:-(
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This is fought tooth and nail by big teacher union big government types to like to spout memes like hey you selfish jerk with privilege
No, others disagree too. Primarily we take the funding away form the public school, then also add our own private money, and send our kid to a better funded school. Great for those of us who can afford it, very bad for those who cannot afford it. Generally speaking I think public schools have been a tremendous success, so I don't want to see that system dismantled.
What we'
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At one point, we considered moving our son to a private school. It turned out that the school would have cost us $16,000 a year per child. (We have two children.) They offered financial breaks but we heard from multiple people that taking these meant opening up all of your spending to the school for them to scrutinize. (e.g. "Why did you take this one annual family vacation during summer break when you could have paid us more money?") It was way too expensive for us so we stuck with public schools. Si
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they argue against it because its stupid.
the cost of operating a school does not scale linearly with the number of students, specifically in the downward direction. much like, where income tax is concerned and why an across the board flat tax is stupid, there is a minimum cost of living that does not scale down even if income does, operating a school has certain fixed/minimum costs, even if there is only 1 student.
this is how education gets underfunded, leading to a cycle of poor performance at schools wher
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I want poor families to have the same privilege as rich families when it comes to education: send their kids to a school of their choice. The way to do that is to give kids school vouchers.
What snobs like you want is to railroad poor kids into lousy public schools, while they move into expensive suburbs with good schools, and while their political heroes send their kids to top private schools.
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A problem with your approach is that a parent can only employ your so-called solution for his or her own kids. He or she can't also send someone else's kids to a private school. Yet, these other kids are also to be a part of society's future and, potentially, shaping it in a significant way. So, the better approach is to address situations such as this textbook one in Texas so that the majority of kids learn what's right and real and not just the few that, purely by chance, were born into a situation tha
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Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property. Tell you what, we could subject you to the same things as the slaves were, and you could tell us your thoughts on the difference.
This isn't about being PC, this is about pretending people who think that saying "well, it wasn't that bad" aren't morons.
"Workers" aren't chained up, brought thousands of miles, bought and sold, killed or maimed at will.
You simply can't talk about slavery and try claim you're being "PC" by referring to them as "workers" instead of what they really were. At that point you're just saying stupid shit like "well, slavery was a matter of historical perspective, and if you were a landowner these were valuable employees". This is literally whitewashing history to gloss over the details and downplay what actually happened.
That's not PC. That's fully intellectually dishonest, and re-casting slavery to pretend it wasn't that bad. This is fully revisionist history and dishonesty so a bunch of white folks can pretend like it was all a big misunderstanding ... and I say this as a pasty white guy.
Essentially Texas has said their education is no longer about facts, which means who knows what kind of crap will creep into textbooks.
Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, I don't know ... because worker seems to imply they had some choice in this instead of being property.
Slave labor is still labor. They're still workers, and they still need to get paid. The difference is we pay them what we want, not what they want; sometimes we don't pay them enough, and they starve, and it's expensive.
That's something a lot of people miss: there's all kinds of novels written in worlds where they reference some backwards nation or evil corporation using slave labor and thus having infinite resources because it's free. Problem is you have to feed your slaves or they die; you have to give them medical care or they don't produce as good a rate of return; and somebody has to make that shit. Slaves are farming food? That's great. You can take, say, 90% of it, and the other 10% is their pay because they need to not die or you'll need to spend 60 times their monthly budget on a new slave to replace them. Think about how useless an 8 year old is as a worker; do you want to sink all that slave labor into building a new slave, 8 or 10 or 14 years before it's even useful? Maybe you can get a better deal paying sailors for 10 months of their time sailing to another country, abducting people, and sailing back with their catch.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
What it was was inefficient, expensive, and nationally embarrassing. It was so embarrassing we instituted a compromise in the Union whereby half of all states would be slave states for some 50 years, after which the Federal Government was allowed to legislate slavery away. Then we got in a war with ourselves about the whole thing. The end of slavery was put on the horizon, and then we took it by force when we got there because that's what we agreed on.
People want to write revisionist history. Some folks want to downplay the facts; others want to play them up until we're looking back on gloating, horned demons. The truth is somewhere in the middle--but not right in the middle, like the "fair and balanced" advocates want you to believe. Averaging the wrong views doesn't get you the right view; it's usually off-center.
Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:4, Informative)
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
The thing about slavery in the US is that people hear it and think of massive plantations utilizing scores of slave labor in horrible conditions, when the reality was much different. Slaves were an expensive investment akin to machinery today. The majority of slaveholders only owned at most a handful of slaves (if that much) and treated them fairly decently. Beating a slave regularly has as much logic as a modern farmer taking a sledgehammer to his tractor because it broke down. Now, was it a horrible system that deprived people of their free will and humanity? Absolutely. Did things like arbitrary beatings and rapes occur? No doubt. But they weren't widespread, and a lot of poor white farmers lived in conditions not too dissimilar than slaves did. About the only differences between poor whites and the slaves was that the whites were still allowed to own property and participate in politics.
I'm sure someone will miscontrue what I said and claim that I said slavery wasn't bad, which it was. But I will admit that I am one of those people that believes the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, but that slavery was simply a symptom of larger underlying factors that caused the war. So that probably makes me a racist in some people's eyes.
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That's all true, but they weren't exactly lauded kings. They were treated like slaves, and people have to take that out to absurd conclusions: the occasional beating, the rape, the right to just kill them for looking at you wrong, it all translates to evil men satisfying their sadistic bloodlust at all hours of the day.
It's really the kind of mistake fiction writers frequently make: the bad guy doesn't have motivations; he's just evil. He stomps on children and kicks puppies so he can gloat about how
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Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe....just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
That sounds bad
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Not to defend it, but then they would have used the word slave twice in close proximity, a writing no no.
Oh, wait. They used the word worker twice anyway. [washingtonpost.com]
But repeating the word "slave" isn't the issue. It's the use of the word "worker" that's the problem. They said: "The Atlantic slave trade ... brought millions of workers from Africa ..." They could have said: "The Atlantic slave trade ... brought millions of people from Africa ..." Then there would have been no problem.
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If I said "Class, the 'Triangular Trade' is the term used to describe the trade route by which Caribbean sugar was shipped to the northern colonies, where it was turned into rum, and the rum shipped to west Africa, where it was traded for workers, who were needed to produce sugar in the Caribbean." it is hard to say, with a straight face, that I am being anything close to accurate: Yes, slaves do work, and people who work are workers, so quoth Merriam Webster; but it's cle
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My issue is mostly that there's a lot of seeing the forest for the trees and injecting modern politics into history in a confusing way. When teaching about the triangular trade, the specific aspects of life of "the workers" may not be quite as important as the flow of money and goods. It's important to understand how the economy worked and what a balance sheet might have looked like. The focus should have been on economics. It should be pretty dry, but it should be immediately clear how very profitable this
Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:5, Informative)
The actual wording [nyt.com] of the textbook reads:
While that alone may technically be accurate, it's a great mischaracterization of the situation. It's even more egregious because the section of the book it's in is under "Patterns of Immigration". It's not really immigration when it's a forced migration to a place you're not even recognized as a full human let alone any chance, at that time, of being a citizen.
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But it's also clear and un-ambiguous from the actual wording that they are referring slaves.
I can't see how anyone could read it and not know that the 'workers' are slaves.
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But it's also clear and un-ambiguous from the actual wording that they are referring slaves.
I can't see how anyone could read it and not know that the 'workers' are slaves.
It's clear and unambiguous to an adult, who already knows about slavery and the slave trade. If you're a child, learning about it in school, you don't already know those things. You might wonder what portion of those workers were slaves, or why it was called the slave trade if it was just a migration of workers.
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But it's also clear and un-ambiguous from the actual wording that they are referring slaves.
I can't see how anyone could read it and not know that the 'workers' are slaves.
It's clear and unambiguous to an adult, who already knows about slavery and the slave trade. If you're a child, learning about it in school, you don't already know those things. You might wonder what portion of those workers were slaves, or why it was called the slave trade if it was just a migration of workers.
Give kids some credit. They are not dumb.
Kids are also learning in their English class to look for synonyms and not use the same word repetitively, especially in the same sentence. I would expect a professional wordsmithing company like Mcgraw-Hill to do the same, as indeed they have.
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its an exercise in lying/misleading with literal truth.
like the related field of lying with statistics.
the things said are literally true, but presented in a way to confer a meaning different than face value.
Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:5, Informative)
It's immigration (and emigration) whenever a group of people migrate from one region to another, regardless of what the reason is or how they're treated.
It's a little bit of a tricky word territory because it would be inaccurate to call them "immigrants". That word is usually used in modern English to refer to non-forced migration, so could make the reader draw inaccurate conclusions.
It is, though, completely reasonable to put the event under a discussion of "Patterns of Immigration", because that is clearly referring to large-scale movements of people with important sociological and historical impacts. Historically, many major human migrations have been the result of slavery, exile, genocide, and other such unpleasant and rather non-voluntary reasons. They're still called migrations.
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How about this spin:
The primarily Mexican undocumented immigrants came to do the jobs that no one else would do for a less than fair wage.
Wonder how the PC police will render that if it were in a textbook.
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Slaves don't.
If you can't tell the difference, then please submit your resume to me today, I'm Hiring
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You might ask a slave that question. I'm sure he'd happily clarify the distinction.
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You might ask a slave that question. I'm sure he'd happily clarify the distinction.
If there are actual slaves in existence (I'm guessing there are, I mean we have ISIS and we have dictators in Central and South America and Africa), then I highly doubt that he would clarify the distinction, happily or otherwise.
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You don't have to go that far to find "actual slaves". You can find quite a few right there in the state of Texas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:Fact check or PC checking? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's disingenuous to call a slave a 'worker' because it intentionally leaves out important context. The fact that they were slaves instead of free men is an important thing to understand in a history book.
And it would be disingenuous if it was intentional and there was no mention of slaves elsewhere. The fact that the "offending" sentence already used the word slave once in the sentence shows that they weren't trying to hide the fact that they were slaves.
A few more way to write it would be:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of men, women, and children from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of people from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of them from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
Are these all offensive too because they fail to use the word slave a second time?
Sure, they could have picked one of these other sentences which might have been better but don't assume the author was being disingenuous and trying to imply something when most likely the word selected was done haphazardly with very little intentional thought.
But if you want it to be the most factual and truthful, how about this one:
The African Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of african natives captured and sold primarily by their native country men and rival tribes from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.
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The context is provided right there: "The African Slave Trade brought millions of workers...", so they are obviously not pretending that these people came voluntarily. The fact that these slaves were "workers" from an economic point of view because economics drove a lot of the dispute between the North and
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worker [wur-ker]
noun
1. a person or thing that works.
2. a laborer or employee: steel workers.
3. a person engaged in a particular field, activity, or cause: a worker in psychological research; a worker for the Republican Party.
4. Entomology.
a member of a caste of sexually underdeveloped, nonreproductive bees, specialized to collect food and maintain the hive.
a similar member of a specialized caste of ants, termites, or wasps.
5. Printing. one of a set of electrotyped plates used to print from
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She's a Texas governor Abbot's crony who's in charge of Board of Education. Keep in mind she isn't qualified to run any education system and doesn't believe in it. She homeschooled her own children and sent them to private schools.
So Obama isn't qualified to lead because he sends his kids to private school?
You actually did (Score:5, Interesting)
That's because you took Economics not PolySci (Score:2)
That's because if you follow the logical laws of economics you get capitalism. The other things you are thinking about are political constructs.
Re:That's because you took Economics not PolySci (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually capitalism comes out really badly in many sectors when looked at from an economics point of view. Particularly natural monopolies (eg: utilities), or where there is no real competition (eg: emergency heath services).
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And which "competing systems" would you have them teach? Economics isn't a course on various forms of government, they were teaching you how the system you lived under actually operates.
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We don't actually live in a purely capitalist society. Patents & copyrights are embedded into our constitution and are anti capitalist in that they create a monopoly based on the force of law rather than a free market.
Utility monopolies in areas - ie cable, telephone, power ... again quasi socialist concepts - the state
Nice troll (Score:2)
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California
So, we'd go from hopelessly biased in one direction to hopelessly biased in the other.