Elrac's Journal: The USA lies on the equator?

I Just read Is this the equator? in the Orlando Sentinel. Apparently there's a school textbook out claiming that the equator runs through the US.

OK, accidents happen. This wouldn't be so bad if this were a case in isolation. What makes this a tragedy is the combination of these circumstances:

• A large number of texts contain a lot of factual errors like this;
• Publishers point to errata pages on their Web sites;
• Corrections mailed in are frequently not applied;
• The number of errors is increasing;
• More emphasis is placed on political correctness than factual correctness;
• Hack writers are employed to write textbooks, the authors on the cover have sometimes never heard of the books;
• State school boards make texts mandatory for public schools throughout the state;
• Local schools are not allowed to make their own choice of (perhaps) better texts;
• The school boards' review panels often don't have members qualified to judge the subject matter of texts, especially science texts;
• Texts are published by a very small group of quasi-monopolists;
• Textbook publishers spend 30% of their budgets on marketing, which doesn't leave that much for content and quality; and
• Teachers often don't have solid knowledge of topics, especially science, and so can't spot and correct errors in the books.

I'd like to quote the most glaring example of where this all leads:

...Marie and Pierre Curie, the French couple who shared a Nobel Prize for their research on radiation. Before the advent of political correctness, textbooks pictured the husband-wife team together. Soon, however, Pierre's picture was excised. And then, some textbooks -- for example, Chemical Building Blocks, one of 15 books in Prentice Hall's Science Explorer series -- darkened the skin of the Polish-born Marie, presumably to suggest she was a woman of color.

What does this tell us? Corporatism and Political Correctness, combined with a lack of diversity and most likely corruption, result in school kids being taught incorrect data about science and other topics.

The USA is a high-tech country, and one of its mainstays is technical innovation. Shoddy school policy is dumbing down the US population, to the detriment of the whole nation.

Re:Not Surprised

[Elrac]

TxMxP, I'm mostly with you. I'm sure conservative fundamentalist Talib..., err, Christians are the root of much evil in the US. If you read the Web site for the article author's book, you see a very long page full of whackos encouraging each other to destroy what's left of science in the country. I was particularly struck by (I quote loosely from memory):

We must keep a tight rein on scientists; because they don't have a moral absolute, they can't be trusted.

. Fuck, Christians are the ones who invented the

Re:Not Surprised

[Elrac]

The author of the article is Pam Winnick. Her new book is A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion. The discussion I mentioned above is in William A. Dembski's Intelligent Design Weblog [uncommondescent.com]. Read it and weep for the sanity of the USA!