No, my friends, this is not an editorial from the LA Times. The text you see above is page 128 from a textbook used to teach foreign students Englsih. In other words, it's from an ESL (English as a second language for all you UC Santa Cruz Community Studies majors) textbook.
The text is First Steps in Academic Writing (2nd edition) by Ann Hogue (Pearson-Longman), And guess who the footnote credits for the "lesson". Code Pink.
Don't think this is an idolated example. Many ESL texts are chock full of politically-correct topics like the Environment and other not-so-hidden messages that try to teach students much more than the Englsih language.
This leads to another issue. The California state agency that approves textbooks is the most politically-correct in the nation. That means if you want to sell texts in California, you have to tailor your texts to please the liberals on the board. That affects other states as well since it is easier to make one size that fits all.
That means that if I wanted to produce a text that argued in favor of Hummers, what do you think my chances are of selling it to California?
Anyway, since my humble blog is not subject to the censors in California, here is one reason why Hummers are better than Smarts:
If a Hummer and a Smart were involved in a head-on collision, who do you think would survive?
Once I browsed the text books at UCI for the Middle East History course and found the same bias.
ReplyDeleteA lot of weird stuff creeps into our textbooks because whatever the mechanism to monitor it is ineffective or the monitors themselves have an ideology to sell.
.
Nominated this for the Fousesquak post of the year.
ReplyDeleteThis is part of the socialization process to make them good Americans. Otherwise, while Americans who have learned about high gas prices are moving to more fuel-efficient cars, including mid-size hybrids with lots of luxury features, these immigrants have ideas from watching American movies that a Hummer is THE thing to have.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't buy that little smart car just now though. My Kia Rio does my just fine at 35 mpg.
Have you ever seen the old McGuffy readers? Talk about indoctrination! Really Gary... do you think anyone is going to choose what car to buy based on what they read in an English text book? All the boys care about is what will impress girls.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteUnfortuntely people make choices every day based on what they see in a text or a movie or when some dopey actor makes a dopey political statement. That's why we have commercials.