“Zombie” has been running a frightening series on the state of our educational system all week. Here’s today’s installment, but there are links to the previous ones.
10 thoughts on “Indoctrination Nation”
Comments are closed.
“Zombie” has been running a frightening series on the state of our educational system all week. Here’s today’s installment, but there are links to the previous ones.
Comments are closed.
That’s insane.
I’ve blogged on the first three and look forward to the next two.
I’m amazed at how slanted the news coverage of this was (when it was even discussed in the news.)
While I don’t agree with everything the Texas board tried to do I am certainly glad to see anyone fighting the blatant indoctrination in our schools.
I had two kids in the California system before moving to Maryland. The most shocking experience I ever had was looking at one of their high school “science” books.
It was a chemistry book, and contained the periodic table of elements. But it left out two: uranium and plutonium. And they were not mentioned anywhere else in the book…
Yu wood knot wont fifth graderz to make da bomb ya know.
I remember reading a conjecture some time ago that you could make a nuclear hand grenade out of Californium–they did have Californium in the table, didn’t they? After all, it was a California textbook.. Hand grenade is something of a misnomer–critical mass is 5 kg–maybe more like a nuclear bowling ball. That’s one way to pick up a split.
Keep in mind that’s the bare-sphere critical mass — a hand grenade would have to have a subcritical mass and something to implode it, or collide two pieces….
I recall reading somewhere about californium fissile bullets… but that seems a bit out of line with a 5 kg critical mass….
The late, great Herman Kahn proposed the californium bullet in his seminal 1961 work on nuclear weapons policy On Thermonuclear War. He describes a hypothetical “nuclear six-gun” firing bullets of subcritical californium (presumably 251Cf) with a nominal yield of ±.01 KT per shot. The reference can be found on page 494 of the original Princeton University Press edition.
The design of such a weapon would be an interesting problem. Assuming one could amass enough Cf to make the “bullets” (Cf critical mass is about 5000 g), carrying the damned thing would be the real problem: 251Cf emits both hard gamma and neutrons at an astonishing rate, and generates about 40w/g of heat as a result. 200 kW per critical mass… ouch!
Hmm. Hook it up to some sort of heat engine and it could generate about 1200 hp before firing. Self-propelled weapons, I suppose. It seems that it would almost be better just to have it drive around enemy territory than to actually fire it. Kind of similar to Project Pluto.
i’m pretty much at the point that any ‘teacher’ worth their hire ought to be able to develop their own texts for the students and it should be a condition of their employment. Death to the text industry!
I had several adjuncts in college that taught their classes sans texts of the sort overpriced in the local book shop. So I know it can be done.
I’ve also developed my own course material for my own students. (Yes, elementary math/english/fill-in-the-blanks is so much harder than armored combat vehicle electrical system troubleshooting…)
For the love of god, you do NOT need the nth’d edition multi-media powerpoint extravaganza to teach math to 4th graders. And if you don’t have the knowledge to teach without some other rent-seeking loser’s text you’re absolutely worthless.
Some subjects have more need of text than others, but in the age of kindle like devices we have no need to process a forest every year. I completely agree with JS regarding good teachers.
What we need is a library of curriculum organized chapters that teachers could provide the data reader of their students in support of whatever they teach.
Education, not indoctrination!
Does anybody have experience with Edubuntu?