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Texas Board of Education Rewrites Our Textbooks

TheLastMohican

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http://content.usatoday.com/communi...-school-board-backs-conservative-curriculum/1

In a decision that will ultimately affect what tens of millions of U.S. students will learn, the Texas State Board of Education has endorsed new state standards for teaching history and social studies that reflect a conservative point of view, according to news reports out of Austin.
Reflecting a partisan political split, the Republican-dominated board voted, 10-5, to adopt the new 10-year curriculum for 4.7 million Texas students, one of the biggest and most influential markets for textbook publishers. Final approval is set for May.
Among the changes approved today, the board:
 
Yeah, I've been reading about that and I'm not too surprised. There is a liberal bias to textbooks, but I don't think inserting a conservative bias is the best way of addressing it.
 
The laws of nature of our deist founders are quite different than the laws of nature of social conservatives. The former are what can be derived from rational observation of the world, the latter are what can be derived from the Bible.
 
[strike]Rational = emotional[/strike] (rational and emotional are intertwined, not exactly equal, of course), says Descartes' error from my signature; or in other words, following strong conviction / principle, regardless of new input.
 
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Rational = emotional, says Descartes' error from my signature; or in other words, following strong conviction / principle, regardless of new input.

Huh? Rational does not equal emotional. While both are essential components of mental health and a well rounded human being, they are not the same thing. Being obstinate is not rationality. I have no idea where you got that bullshit.
 
Neuroscience.
 
No emotions, no decisions, so no rationality as we know it. Descartes' error is the principle that was coined by the authors of these studies. The long lasted tradition of opposing rationality and empathy seems to lose ground, because they are physiologically mixed. Anyway, that's way outside of the scope of what we could hope any radical conservatives to accept. Yet.
 
No emotions, no decisions, so no rationality as we know it. Descartes' error is the principle that was coined by the authors of these studies. The long lasted tradition of opposing rationality and empathy seems to lose ground, because they are physiologically mixed. Anyway, that's way outside of the scope of what we could hope any radical conservatives to accept. Yet.

Oooooookay. First off, you were saying that emotions and rationality are the same thing. They are not. Cognitive and emotional processes are mixed and each can guide the other. In simple terms, the somatic markers hypothesis suggests that in situations where there are many conflicting and complex alternative options that can be reasoned, that the emotional processes can come into play in helping make a decision. As I interpret it, all the hypothesis suggests is that when reason fails to make a decision, your emotions can come into play. Nothing about that hypothesis suggests that rationality is the same thing as being obstinate or that rationality is the same thing as emotion. It only seems to suggests that when rationality fails, emotions take over.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the original point that the deist founding father believed that they could utilize reason to determine natural laws or what radical conservatives would accept.
 
There is a series of situations, including very recent cases, when they get to test how a patient who has lost emotional capability also becomes unable to make rational decisions. The dependency seems to be crucial. It's almost completely unrelated, except that the whole view of how people approach their cooperation (which I already indicated, is very deeply natural) doesn't have to be based on non-empathic elements such as distrust, as some basic rule. For example, John Nash based his equilibrium on such assumptions for rationality, and got the Nobel prize for it, but by now he himself admits that it seems he wasn't right about the distrustful basis of the model, in the first place.
 
Well, the USA is a constitutional republic, as well as a representative democracy. So I'm kind of on the fence with this one.
What I find perturbing about this decision is that they didn't just employ both words as they would naturally be used; they removed the word "democratic." We are part "republic" and part "democracy," because those terms are not mutually exclusive; in fact, if you put the word "constitutional" in front of them, they mean the same thing. The U.S. could also be correctly referred to as a "republican democracy." It's important to teach the origins of the words (Latin and Greek, along with their respective ancient governments) and how our government incorporates them both. What they're doing here is tossing out the word that might imply agreement with the Democratic Party, and replacing it with one that might imply agreement with the Republican Party. Petty.

Depends on how these ideas are actually discussed, but I find it hard to argue with the position that they are ideas that have at times influenced American politics, sometimes quite strongly.
I found that bit rather vague, so depending on what they mean by "major political ideas," it might be just fine.
 
The power elites don't need everyone's votes, they only need to convince enough of the poorly informed people to support them; thus bypassing the well informed people, who wouldn't vote for them because they understand the issues and their implications

It helps their chances as well if they can make as many people, as possible, poorly informed (engineered ignorance)
 
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your asssuming only the poorly informed voted for this, realisticly you have no idea.

I don't support this or deny it, I don't have enough info.
 
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No I'm not talking about the Texas State Board of Education, I'm talking about the system of democracy in the US and how regressive forces use an illusion of democracy in order to hold onto power

It is through a doctored education system that large parts of the population can be kept poorly informed....I should have been clearer, i've made the necessary edit
 
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