education

REPORT: Academics' donations go overwhelmingly to Democrats

...The report also says that academics donated more than employees of oil companies and drug makers.

It's a conspiracy, see? All the universities are really brainwashing institutes. They pretend they're teaching you critical thinking, you know, how to think for yourself, but they're really turning you into a liberal! That's why all these people are supporting Democrats! That's why we need to get rid of tenure and put ignorant people into teaching positions in colleges so that they can allow us all to remain ignorant! Because what you don't know won't bother you!

--In fact, we should ban professors from being able to donate to political candidates altogether! They're a special interest, doncha know! Unrestricted campaign contributions are only for the Republicans. Can't let just anybody give money to Democrats, can we?

Via Think Progress, we learn this horror:

In 2005, the Kansas Board of Education received national ridicule when it rewrote public school standards to cast doubt on the mainstream evolution theories of Charles Darwin.

One of the board members who voted to teach intelligent design was Kenneth Willard, a conservative who is now the only member running as president-elect for the National Association of State Boards of Education. NASBE is a nonprofit organization of state school boards that “works to strengthen state leadership in educational policymaking.”

Willard was one of the Kansas board’s most vocal proponents of intelligent design....

With education scores falling behind the rest of the world, this is just what we need: a champion of willful ignorance in charge of a national education organization.

I stumble across The Secret website and think, "Well, I've heard of this pop concept, so I'll go take a look," and click past the splash screen (hello!) and see that they list "Featured Teachers."

Well....

It seems that women don't have much to offer in the Featured Teachers department. Well, four out of twenty-four people happen to be women.

Funny how this happens. Women don't innovate, and now, it seems, women have nothing to teach, at least about "The Secret." [cue dramatic music stinger]

So what is The Secret? Apparently a penis helps answer that question.

Apparently the Bible is now the litmus test against which all science must be measured. Never mind what we can observe in the world, religious dogma is the only truth to be taught in schools in Federal Way, near Seattle.

This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."

After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film.

That's right. Global warming is too un-"God"-ly of a concept for children.

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

In other words, one can assume, Hardison believes global warming is a good thing. There's nothing like having people looking forward to Armageddon calling the shots in schools to scare the crap out of you.

School Board members adopted a three-point policy that says teachers who want to show the movie must ensure that a "credible, legitimate opposing view will be presented," that they must get the OK of the principal and the superintendent, and that any teachers who have shown the film must now present an "opposing view."

But not an opposing scientific view, but rather a view opposing science itself.

Let's look at some other examples where, following Federal Way's example, we should oppose science:

• The earth is round vs. the earth is flat
• The earth revolves around the sun vs. the heavens move on invisible spheres through ether
• The flu virus evolves vs. God makes the flu to punish humankind for homosexuality

Maybe it's time to buy stock in fundamentalist Christianist textbook companies.

I suppose Lawrence Summers would question whether women are even capable of handling such a position.

Harvard, unlike other Ivy League schools, has never had a female president and choosing one would be a milestone in its 371-year history.

The Globe said Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard's law school, and Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, are among the finalists in the top-secret selection process.

Well, Ivy is a female name, after all.

It seems that radical hard-line fundamentalist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants liberal and secular teachers kicked out of schools.

"Today, students should shout at the president and ask why liberal and secular university lecturers are present in the universities."

Hmm..... Sounds like he's a Republican.

Pam Spaulding finds a doosie coming from the poor, insecure conservative sex activists who still seem to be wrestling with their choice to be all-American heterosexuals -- being an orientation-optional bisexual heterosexual (dammit!) and socially conservative role model must be a terrible cross to bear for these folks -- because they're trying to project their own sexual orientation arbitrariness on the rest of the population, this time in an indictment against tolerance programs that undercut macho bullying.

Talk about ass-backwards thinking. Teaching tolerance, according to the doyenne of Columbus, Ohio-based Mission[ary Position] America, Linda Harvey, is turning male students into stone cold killers and stressed-out neurotics. She’s obsessed with Homosexual Agenda infiltrating the school system, and this freakout is par for the course.

Read on.

Hey, kids, don't study while watching TV.

Duh!

WASHINGTON - Your parents were right, don't study with the TV on. Multitasking may be a necessity in today's fast-paced world, but new research shows distractions affect the way people learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on.

But wait, Sherlock! There's more (if you're capable of learning, that is):

As Poldrack explains it, the brain learns in two different ways. One, called declarative learning, involves the medial temporal lobe and deals with learning active facts that can be recalled and used with great flexibility. The second, involving the striatum, is called habit learning....

...The problem, Poldrack said, is that the two types of learning seem to be competing with each other, and when someone is distracted, habit learning seems to take over from declarative learning.

"We have to multitask in today's world, but you have to be aware of this," he said. "When a kid is trying to learn new concepts, new information, distraction is going to be bad, it's going to impair their ability to learn."

This means that don't try to multitask when learning -- for example, don't try to watch Fox and get the news of what's happening at the same time. They work at cross purposes and leave you confused.

The Money Changers

from Talk to Action

Last week, Mainstream Baptist wondered, What's the Matter with Texas?, and referenced the Texas Freedom Network's incisive new report: "The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006."

No one should be surprised to hear that there's a whole lot the matter with Texas, or that -- as is the case even in religion-driven politics – the root of our state's particular evil can be traced to the love of money. Here in Texas, rich men who hand money out by the bucketload are using their wealth to buy a state government that looks like their vision of the promised land.

They called it the Reagan Revolution. I meet intelligent and articulate people who cannot remember America before Reagan.

Steven Colbert interviewed a young conservative woman who wants to go back to the "old days" and she looks longingly back to a by-gone era. But that era that she describes was an era of Democratic Presidents and liberal reform.

The conservative nostalgia is based on an era with mainly Democrats in the White House and Congresses largely control by the Democrats. From 1932 until Ronald Reagan, the only two elected Republicans Presidents were Eisenhower and Nixon - Nixon who resigned in disgrace and had Ford fill out the remainder of the term. The rest were all Democrats in the Presidency with a largely Democrat Congress.

So the nostalgia that conservatives wax poetic about has nothing to do with the "Reagan Revolution," except in the sense of the nostalgia.

Reagan was old enough to by my grandfather, or great-grandfather to people in their 20s. People in the era of Reagans own youth had memories of growing up in the Great Depression. These were hard times and the Democrats came to power because economic times were bad. Rightly or wrongly the bad economic times were blamed on the Republicans and they were voted out.

America became powerful and great during an unprecedented era of government involvement and regulation.

The Reagan vision of America before Nixon/Ford/Carter does not square with the fact that for almost 50 years, the Democrats' vision of America is the one that made America what it was. The conservatives think that by reversing all the Democrat/liberal policies and programs that this will make America what it once was.

The halcyon days were not achieved by Republican policies.

GWB, our President, is not in a Great Depression scenario, but clearly the economy is not what it once was.

We got a glimpse of what Democrats can do - and Clinton (a rather conservative Democrat) was able to bring fiscal responsibility and move the government into the black.