Let's burn some books!

[Il_Mostro]

21st Century Book-Burning
Steven J. Ross, chairman of the history department at the University of Southern California:
[ QUOTE ]
One of the marks of authoritarian regimes is their effort to stop the spread of knowledge and free speech. In May 1933, Nazi sympathizers in Berlin burned 20,000 "degenerate" books, many of them written by Jews and anti-fascists such as Albert Einstein, Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka. Here at home, slaveholders were so frightened by the power of the word that throughout the antebellum South legislatures made it a crime to teach slaves to read and write.

Now, Lynne Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's wife and the former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has placed herself in the company of dictators and slaveholders. At her urging, the Education Department destroyed more than 300,000 copies of a booklet designed to help parents and children learn more about America's past.

[/ QUOTE ]

[jakethebake]

Yea. Have you ever seen those National Standards? They should've been burned a long time ago. I think the fact that they were created at UCLA says enough.

[andyfox]

http://hnn.us/articles/8418.html

Note that the first respondent was in favor of the book burning.

[jakethebake]

[ QUOTE ]
http://hnn.us/articles/8418.html

Note that the first respondent was in favor of the book burning.

[/ QUOTE ]
Those aren't books. They're nothing but crap. There's not a fact to be found in them.

[andyfox]

Ms. Cheney asked the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA to coordinate the writing of the standards that Congress had mandated in 1992. The standards were developed over thirty-two months in Los Angeles and Washington with teacher task forces working with academic historians, school administrators, and other history educators. Though approved by a national council, half of whose members were her appointees and endorsed by thirty major professional and public interest organizations, the standards were dismissed by Ms. Cheney as having no redeeming value.

Ms. Cheney’s program officer who monitored the standards project over three years, called them “a remarkable document . . . , remarkable in its ambition, its clarity, in the degree to which you have been able to obtain the consensus, the enthusiasm of teachers, and, to perhaps a lesser extent, of scholars around a good deal of this material.” Over 100,000 copies are in the hands of teachers, curriculum developers, textbook publishers, parents, and teacher educators

The council overseeing their construction agreed unanimously that the book would mark “a critical milestone but not the final destination in what must be an ongoing dynamic process of improvement and revision over the years to come.” The standards have been used extensively across the country.

When Ms. Cheney had a look at “Helping Your Child Learn History,” an innocuous pamphlet first issued by the Department of Education (DOE) in 1993 and revised slightly for a new edition in June 2004, she didn't like what she saw. A call or two to the Department of Education produced quick action: pulp the 300,000 copies of the 57-page booklet still on the shelves (some 61,000 were already in the hands of parents) and then reprint 300,000 after deleting a few lines that Ms. Cheney found unacceptable. What were the radioactive lines that obliged the DOE to blow taxpayer money and a couple of trees for ten million new sheets of paper?

-the final clause (italicized) in a sentence that read: “Through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, President George W. Bush has made clear his commitment to the goals of raising standards of achievement for all children and of providing all children with highly qualified teachers and with instruction that is based on scientific research and that reflects the national standards for instruction in the various subject areas.

-a bullet under “Find out about the school’s history curriculum,” where parents were given questions to ask the principal of their children’s school, which read: “Does the history curriculum incorporate the National Standards for History, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education and published in 1996 by the National Center for History in the Schools.”

-one line in a list of 17 web sites “that contain great links for both you and your child,” including websites for National Standards for Social Studies, National Council for History Education, Family Education Network, KidSource, and National History Day. The offending website? You guessed it: “National Standards for United States History” followed by the url of UCLA’s National Center for History in the Schools.
That’s it. Three lines, 300,000 pamphlets trashed, 300,000 reprinted, all compliments of the taxpaying public.
the DOE at first said the pamphlet was recalled because of typographical errors. When challenged, the DOE press secretary changed her story. The new spin was that “the final document was not the accurate reflection of policy that was approved originally” (quote from the DOE’s press secretary, Susan Aspey). If that is so, then the DOE will soon recall 9 million booklets on "Helping Your Child Learn Math" (or "Science" or "Geography" or "Civics") because all these other discipline-based pamphlets reference the national standards developed in parallel with the history guidelines.

[Zeno]

My God, Andy - how many times must you round the bases to score a run? You made about 10 laps and then bowled over the catcher just for spite.

Couldn't you have condensed all that to something like: Ms. Cheney used her influence to waste taxpayers money for trival reasons in respect to certain goverment funded publications about teaching and school standards. Or perhaps something clear and cryptic, for example: Ms. Cheney is a putz.

Are you trying to become Elysium Jr.?

-Zeno, Let's just burn all the books and be done with it.

[andyfox]

"how many times must you round the bases to score a run? You made about 10 laps and then bowled over the catcher just for spite."

Guilty as charged.

[jakethebake]

So what's your point? Is it the book burning or waste of tax dollars? I agree on the waste. But as for the burning, the tripe that was burned did in fact have "no redeeming value" as far as I'm concerned. This wasn't burning literature. They were just poorly written history books full of propaganda and factual errors.

[Il_Mostro]

You keep on saying this without even a single references to back you up. Please give us some of your insights, as there seems to be a lot of people supporting the national standards. Now, I have only (barely) skimmed them, but what I saw didn't make me think they where bad, please enlighten me.

[jokerswild]

It shoudldn't surprise anyone.