High School Senior Fights Flawed Climate Science Info in Popular Textbook
by Kenny Luna, North Babylon, NY on 04.10.08
There’s a high school senior named Matthew LaClair seeing red over the flaws in his American Government text, and he’s doing something to make its authors see the error of their ways.
Of course, when one of them holds a prestigious position named after the U.S. President who purportedly took solar panels off of the White House and proclaimed them a sign of weakness one might reasonably suspect the contents are just a little bit skewed when it comes to the basic scientific facts about energy and even global warming.
Apparently, the text offers “a large number of clearly erroneous statements” that give students “the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain," according to Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and the sort of fellow who’s willing to lend a hand where it’s counted.
And the books publishers are taking notice, with all sorts of high-powered types set to review it and offer their own opinions on the topic. But the edition of the textbook published in 2005, and which is in high school classrooms now, states simply that "science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."
A mind-numbingly poor treatment of the topic.
Now I’d love to suggest it’s time for a good old-fashioned book burning, but then we’d have to offset the carbon emissions or we’d be compounding the problem.
And the twisted thing is that some of those books will be used in classrooms for the next twenty years; especially in districts without the funds to replace them. Perhaps people should just begin filing them under "fiction" in the school library?
via:: Associated Press
I wonder if we're heading into an age where students know more about important topics than their teachers. Global warming is the obvious example, but surely there's others. As the technology gap between kids and teachers increases, this is bound to continue.
I think the most important subject that could be taught is how to interpret and consider texts, including considering who has paid for the text, what the author's motivations are, and how to tell advertisements from researched writings.
Recycling is a better alternative to burning.
And these publishers should be sued for their willful incompetence and stupidity. Sued at the very least.
Joke: We should have a good old fashioned bush-lover burning. (Assuming that the publishers are bush-loving, global warming-denying, coal-loving, gay-hating conservatives who are beyond reason and only suitable for being used as fuel. And I think that's a safe assumption...)
Good for Matthew LaClair... You go Matthew LaClair...
congrats to that boy. is it true that world now threatening with warming and melting of the glaciers. so what is our responsibility?
is "popular textbook" an oxymoron? ;)
In a way you have to admire the chutzpah of the good ol' oil loving republicans.
There really is nothing they won't stoop to in their deny, deny, deny approach.
They'll still be denying global warming when the area around the Whitehouse looks like the Gobi desert...
If "American Government: Institutions and Policies" by John Q. Wilson, jr & John Dilulio (Houghton Mifflin) can be considered a "textbook," then George W. Bush is smarter than a turnip (but not by much).
Matthew LaClair has fought for what he believes in not just with this text, but with a widely reported case of flagrant religious intolerance in public schools. He is the recipient of of an ACLU 2008 Youth Scholarship. He is fighting the good fight, and with our current state of the world, we need more heroes like Matthew LaClair.
Bravo, Mr. LaClair, bravo.
thespyofcharles: we wouldn't have an energy crisis if we could power the world with your rage.
And what will happen when we go into the next "Global Freezing Crisis", as we enter the next 11-year Sun cycle? Rewrite the books again? We did this around 11 years ago with the "Next Ice Age" that didn't happen. We are repeating history here with certain powers in "control" mode, only this time we call it the "Warming Crisis"; i.e., see Al Gore's latest "Rethinking the Global Climate" talk over on TED.
We need to mother Earth for sustainability, but let us do it for the right economically sound reasons without blindly turning Environmentalism and Greenism into another dogmatic religion.
Go to http://www.peswiki.com to learn what real technologies are available today and will be in the near future that help reduce our negative impacts to Mother Earth. There are a lot of people around the globe working on positive solutions.
I do not understand why our goverment can't assing enough money for education. People almost forget that kids are our future.