With the state of Louisiana’s new voucher program providing taxpayer funds to private Christian schools — no Muslim schools, please — Mother Jones has an article showing some of the crazier things that students will be taught with public money in that state. These are taken from textbooks used at those Christian schools. A few examples:
“Bible-believing Christians cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years.”—Life Science, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2007
“God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994
“A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991
“[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
Yeah, Louisiana is the perfect place to teach that the Klan were a legitimate group with positive goals, isn’t it?
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Chiroptera
August 16, 2012 at 10:32 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bob Jones University Press
Boy, that name certainly says it all, doesn’t it!
I bet it’s peer reviewed, too — you just don’t want to know who the peers are!
Doug Little
August 16, 2012 at 10:35 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
So basically anything published by Bob Jones University Press is utter garbage.
Doug Little
August 16, 2012 at 10:38 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I can’t tell you how many PhD’s reviewed the work.
lancifer
August 16, 2012 at 10:39 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
No doubt the tykes will be taught that the Klan’s purchase of thousands of white sheets helped to stimulate jobs in the local cotton industry.
Modusoperandi
August 16, 2012 at 10:39 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“…and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years”? That’s crazy! How can they get away with teaching garbage like that? I mean, all Bible-believing Christians know that the dinosaurs were all wiped out in The Flood.
d cwilson
August 16, 2012 at 10:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I think they’re confusing the Klan’s “targets” with its members.
raven
August 16, 2012 at 10:47 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
A lot of states have charter school programs.
The schools must teach to state standards including biology, they are tested, and failing ones are shut down. This actually works reasonably well, and most charter schools aren’t even religiouly based.
Louisiana seems to be a whole other case here.
From what I’ve read, they supposedly have a testing and assessing system in place. But when you actually look closer, they don’t.
Without testing and monitoring, they can and will destroy the educations of a lot of kids, and not even know it. Which is the exact idea here.
I’d ask if Louisiana ever gets tired of being one of the most backward states in the USA, but why bother. Maybe wallowing in ignorance helps them deal with the heat and humidity.
slc1
August 16, 2012 at 10:58 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Of course, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal who signed the legislation has a degree in biology from Brown.
Reginald Selkirk
August 16, 2012 at 11:01 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The phrase “Thank God for Mississippi” is popular in Louisiana and elsewhere. A few years back, it was actually proposed as a new state motto in New Mexico.
kantalope
August 16, 2012 at 11:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If you are stupid, is your educational goal for your children to get stupider?
“God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”
The forest gods used the Bataan Death march to bring many to Shintoism.
Stalin used the Goulag to bring many to Totalitarianism.
Oh, this works on so many levels.
And Good for the Klan…I didn’t think they had anyone in their organization bright enough to write and then you use their skills writing propaganda…bless their hearts.
Area Man
August 16, 2012 at 11:24 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s actually not inaccurate, though it appears to put a gloss on slave-holding and raises the question of what “treated well” is supposed to mean. Slaves were valuable property and it was in the slave owners’ economic interest to keep them healthy. Killing them was not a smart thing to do. This didn’t make the practice any less wrong of course.
d cwilson
August 16, 2012 at 11:26 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Oh they know it. Having an ignorant, easily manipulated population lacking even the most basic critical thinking skills is a feature, not a bug.
d cwilson
August 16, 2012 at 11:29 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Area Man:
It all depends on how you define “treated well”. Yeah, they were fed and housed. They were also beaten for even the most minor infractions and had their families sold and taken away from them.
bmiller
August 16, 2012 at 11:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Bobby J may have a degree in biology….but he also believes in and participates in exorcisms. “Education” is not a panacea for sheer human bloodymindedness.
jthompson
August 16, 2012 at 11:44 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Reginald Selkirk: It’s been Alabama’s unofficial state motto for decades. The presence of Mississippi is the only thing that kept us off the bottom in most lists.
jthompson
August 16, 2012 at 11:51 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@Area Man: The only way it’s even possible to argue slaves were remotely well treated is to ignore the existence of women entirely. Which the kind of people pushing these textbooks are good at.
I wonder if they’d be willing to hazard a guess at the percentage of female slaves that didn’t get raped by their owners, because if I had to guess, the number I’d guess would be very low indeed.
There’s no economic incentive to not rape slaves, if anything the incentive would run in the opposite direction.
shouldbeworking
August 16, 2012 at 11:56 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wouldn’t say that working with some politicians is a plus in the klan’s favour (or anyone else’s favour either).
iftikharahmad
August 16, 2012 at 12:22 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Almost all children now believe they go to school to pass exams. The idea that they may be there for an education is irrelevant. State schools have become exam factories, interested only in A to C Grades. They do not educate children. Exam results do not reflect a candidate’s innate ability. Employers have moaned for years that too many employees cannot read or write properly. According to a survey, school-leavers and even graduates lack basic literacy and numeracy skills. More and more companies are having to provide remedial training to new staff, who can’t write clear instructions, do simple maths, or solve problems. Both graduates and school-leavers were also criticised for their sloppy time-keeping, ignorance of basic customer service and lack of self-discipline.
Bilingual Muslims children have a right, as much as any other faith group, to be taught their culture, languages and faith alongside a mainstream curriculum. More faith schools will be opened under sweeping reforms of the education system in England. There is a dire need for the growth of state funded Muslim schools to meet the growing needs and demands of the Muslim parents and children. Now the time has come that parents and community should take over the running of their local schools. Parent-run schools will give the diversity, the choice and the competition that the wealthy have in the private sector. Parents can perform a better job than the Local Authority because parents have a genuine vested interest. The Local Authority simply cannot be trusted.
The British Government is planning to make it easier to schools to “opt out” from the Local Authorities. Muslim children in state schools feel isolated and confused about who they are. This can cause dissatisfaction and lead them into criminality, and the lack of a true understanding of Islam can ultimately make them more susceptible to the teachings of fundamentalists like Christians during the middle ages and Jews in recent times in Palestine. Fundamentalism is nothing to do with Islam and Muslim; you are either a Muslim or a non-Muslim.
There are hundreds of state primary and secondary schools where Muslim pupils are in majority. In my opinion all such schools may be opted out to become Muslim Academies. This mean the Muslim children will get a decent education. Muslim schools turned out balanced citizens, more tolerant of others and less likely to succumb to criminality or extremism. Muslim schools give young people confidence in who they are and an understanding of Islam’s teaching of tolerance and respect which prepares them for a positive and fulfilling role in society. Muslim schools are attractive to Muslim parents because they have better discipline and teaching Islamic values. Children like discipline, structure and boundaries. Bilingual Muslim children need Bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods, who understand their needs and demands.
None of the British Muslims convicted following the riots in Bradford and Oldham in 2001 or any of those linked to the London bombings had been to Islamic schools. An American Think Tank studied the educational back ground of 300 Jihadists; none of them were educated in Pakistani Madrasas. They were all Western educated by non-Muslim teachers. Bilingual Muslim children need bilingual Muslim teachers as role models. A Cambridge University study found that single-sex classes could make a big difference for boys. They perform better in single-sex classes. The research is promising because male students in the study saw noticeable gains in the grades. The study confirms the Islamic notion that academic achievement is better in single-sex classes.
Iftikhar Ahmad
Http;//www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk
Area Man
August 16, 2012 at 12:36 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yes of course, if they’re truly trying to downplay the horrors of slavery, they’re being ridiculous. But what’s written there is not completely crazy. I think any good history text should point out that slavery was essentially an economic phenomenon and not an exercise in cruelty for its own sake. Otherwise it’s hard to understand why anyone would bother, or why conditions made slavery highly profitable in some places but not in others.
uzza
August 16, 2012 at 1:48 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@ 18
iftikharahmad, that’s pretty funny but it’s too long. You need to shorten it and beef up the punch line.
Ben P
August 16, 2012 at 2:14 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s possibly accurate to say “slaves were treated like valuable property.” That’s distinctly different from saying they were treated well, although if you really wanted to stretch the point.
It’s important to remember that while large plantations owned a substantial chunk of all slaves, most southerners owned no slaves and the majority of slaves were in households that only owned a few slaves. In Georgia, for example, records show that there were approximately 20,000 slaveholders that owned 1-5 slaves and 200 slaveholders that owned 100 or more. The percentages hold nationally. In 1860 there approximately 216,000 slaveholders in the US that owned 1-5 slaves, 2341 that held 100 or more slaves and 22 that held 500 or more.
There are a number of reasons, but the primary reason is that slaves were very expensive.
A prime field hand slave was worth $400-$600 in 1800, $1300-$1500 in 1850 and as much as $3000 by 1860.
Going from the 1850 numbers that means a high value slave would be worth something like $37,000 to $43,000 in 2010 dollars and possibly quite a bit more.
that leads to a couple points.
1. Being bought and sold like property, I think, is and of itself not being “treated well.” This is particularly true because there wasn’t any incentive to keep families together.
2. If you paid that much for a slave, the incentive was to get your money’s worth. Forced labor is inherent in slavery but that gives an idea of the kind of work that was often expected. Also not being “treated well”
3. Someone already pointed out the unique problems of female slaves.
On the other hand, slaves were valuable property and an owner would have wanted to get the maximum possible work out of them. Also this was before any antibiotics or advanced medical treatment. Severe Uncle Tom’s Cabin style beatings certainly occurred and physical discipline would have been exceedingly common, but the kind of beatings that would cripple or kill a slave would be rarer simply because the slave was an expensive piece of property and the owner was out a lot of money. (There were also criminal laws against mistreating slaves but they were rarely enforced).
Pieter B, FCD
August 16, 2012 at 2:18 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
What a slave was worth in today’s dollars. An extremely thorough analysis.
skinnercitycyclist
August 16, 2012 at 2:29 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
so…. it would have been A-ok if the Klan had merely lynched the projectionist at the Rialto when they were showing “The Last Temptation of Christ”?
raven
August 16, 2012 at 2:41 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Yeah, they targeted bootleggers to steal their moonshine.
Chances are, the Klan was and are the bootleggers, given the social strata they come from.
Up North, they frequently targeted Catholics because there weren’t enough blacks to bother with and the American Indians had a habit of shooting back.
PS Who in the hell wrote that nonsense in the blockquote, David Barton?
raven
August 16, 2012 at 2:46 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Getting away from the advantages of slavery and on topic, above I said in many states charter schools work “reasonable well.”
Which really means they aren’t total disasters. They still have problems.
In general:
1. Test scores are comparable to public schools but usually not better.
2. Teachers are generally paid a lot less. They also tend to be young and inexperienced because of this.
3. Benefits are a lot less, health insurance and so on.
4. The retirement plans are vastly inferior. In some cases, they are nonexistent except for the now common 401(K) plans, in other words, fund your own retirement, hope the stock markets go up a lot, or eat cat food when you get old.
They save a lot of money on teachers by simply not paying them very much.
Draken
August 16, 2012 at 4:15 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Shorter Iftikhar Ahmad:
“I want to have faith schools so we can impose our religion on large groups of small children before they reach the age where they can make a decision for themselves. I’ll call this ‘Islamic culture’ rather than religion so as to make it easier for unbelievers to palate this codswallop. These faith, sorry cultural schools also form a fine place to segregate girls and boys so the boys can achieve better learning results and the girls, oh, err, well, the girls. Look, an eagle!”
I only miss your valuable insights on biological facts like homosexuality and evolution. But I don’t need to ask, do I? I somehow guess homosexuality is not part of the “Islamic culture”.
dingojack
August 17, 2012 at 3:06 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
iftikharahmad – Yes handing control to the locals is a great idea! Perhaps you could import some ‘religion in education experts’ from the good ol’ US to help out and show you how it’s done.
I hear most of the former Board of Education from Dover, Pennsylvania is unemployed at the moment.
Dingo
sc_3c009ec47c8a092c2293d4a8ef6ed391
August 20, 2012 at 12:02 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
European schoolbooks present a distorted image of Islam and Muslims using stereotypes, a five-country study published on Sept 15 revealed showed.
This slanted view reflects “cultural racism,” concluded Germany’s Georg Eckert Institute for textbook research, which analysed 27 volumes used in classrooms in Britain, France, Austria, Spain and Germany. The report was the first of its kind in Europe. “Islam is always presented as an outdated system of rules which has not changed since its golden age,” Susan Krohnert-Othman, said the institute’s project director.
The researchers said that Islam is presented as a homogenous entity without reflecting its diversity in different parts of the world. The report did not find major differences between the five countries studied. The textbooks used at the secondary school level frequently depicted conflict between “antiquated Islam” against a “modern Europe”.
“Even modern European school books include oversimplified presentations of Islam and they stand in the way of a credible intercultural dialogue with the Muslim world,” said Germany’s minister of state for European affairs at the foreign ministry, Cornelia Pieper, after reading the study’s findings.
Muslim schools Performance Table published in the Muslim News (March 30). I have not seen this published anywhere.We keep on reading in the other media that Muslim children and schools do not do well. But according to the GCSE Table published, Muslims schools achieve better than the national average, in English and Maths. We should be celebrating such achievements. We don’t hear this from our leaders at all. All credits to the teachers and head teachers in Muslim schools for helping Muslim pupils achieve good results. Panorama started with praise for most Muslim schools, showing Al-Furqan as an example of what most schools are doing right.
I feel the media machine has stereotyped Muslim schools as non-cohesive and extremist, the truth of the matter is they are no different to any other school; sorry, the only difference being that majority excel in academic achievement…is that a bad thing?
British society and British education system is the home of institutional racism. That is a fact. The solution is that each and every community should have their own state funded schools with their own teachers. Muslim children suffer more than others.They need state funded Muslim schools with bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods.
Muslim schools fight against open discrimination, extremist and agressive atheist and secularist ideas that are now infringing upon our fundamental human rights. A form of social engineering not disimilar to the failed idealogy of communism. LEAs are unable to reconcile diversity and inclusion. They are implementing policies that effectively create confusion, ambiguity and can be abused to prevent any new community service that promotes and celebrates diversity. Muslim schools are attempting to make a stand on behalf of all those who believe that we have the right to choose how to educate our children.
There are hundreds of state and church schools where Muslim children are in majority. In my opinion, all such schools may be opted out as Muslim Academies.
There is no place for a non-Muslim child or a teacher in a Muslim school. Bilingual Muslim children need bilingual Muslim teachers as role models during their developmental periods.
Demand for Islamic education in England is growing fast and schools – official and unofficial – are springing up to meet it. Now some local authorities are concerned that there is insufficient regulation. Although the number of Islamic schools is still small – around 168 at the latest count, just 12 of them state-funded – it is growing fast. About 60 of these schools have opened in the last 10 years; several in the last couple of months. And the demand from parents seems to be huge – one school in Birmingham recently attracted 1,500 applications for just 60 places. At least five Islamic schools have recently applied to be free schools, although so far only one has been approved. Islam promotes seeking knowledge as a form of worship, and things like “memorising the Quran” are rewardable. That makes memorising anything else look easy. Muslims live up to a certain strict code which parents enforce on their children, thereby making them adhere to their schoolwork more than their non-religious counterparts. Islam puts a massive emphasis on education and its essentially part of the religion itself since its Sunnah (following in the manners of the Prophet (pbuh)) but also a lot of the pupils will be from ethnic minority families and stereotypes aside it’s no secret that they encourage their children to excel in their exams and what not.
Anti Islam propoganda in the Western media for the past 20 years, which accellerated after the 911, is having the opposite effect. Some educated people in the West mainly out of curiosity want to learn what Islam is about. When they approach their research with an open mind, probably most of them form positive impressions about Islam and some of whom rightfully convert. In the USA after the events of 911, convertions to Islam pheonominally increased maily in amongst the educated white community and a large majority of them were females.
IA
http://www.londonschoolofislamics.org.uk