Beyond School

Just a quick share of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever:

Optional Media Literacy Readings:
1. Think Peer Reviewed journals are no better than blogs? “How Stuff Works” gives a good overview that will (I hope) make you think again.
2. Shocked that even peered reviewed journals can can be *gasp* imperfect? (To which I say good, so you should think even more about what you read.) This article might interest you (hint: some peer reviewed journals are better than others, and it’s up to you to know the Big League ones).
3. Still think “popular media” journalists — TIME, Newsweek, NYTimes, etc — are as “expert” as scholars, historians, and academics in respected journals?
–Treat yourself to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on mainstream newspaper journalism. (His style is snappy and hilarious.)
–See Bill Moyers’ “Selling the War” (transcript here, or you can watch the documentary online there) on how the mainstream media chose inaccuracy and disinformation due to all sorts of political pressures leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge.

(click for larger image)

Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most:

a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ‘98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US news or TV as a habit since then.  I get my news primarily from political and cultural blogs.  Yet I scored 11/12 correct, compared to 7.4/12 correct for US college graduates.  The question:  What does this say about the US mainstream media’s performance in contributing to an informed citizenry? (I assume most Americans still watch and read mainstream US news.  Maybe I’m wrong.)

b) How does our e-blogosphere and -twittersphere measure up against these results?  If we educators are similarly uninformed, are we connecting at the expense of staying informed?

The State of the Republic reflected in these results makes the following two entries a bit more understandable:

2. Texas Board of Education Approves Bible Study Elective Class

Here’s FOX News on the story

(Historically-informed people will notice that the blond “expert” perpetuates the fallacy that America’s founding fathers were Christians, when many of them were either partly or fully Deist, believing little of the miracle stories or other magical claims of the Church. And she’s going to be teaching the classes )

The New York Times adds this bit of research, to pre-empt the “there’s nothing wrong with teaching it as history” argument:

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Since Texas shares with California the biggest sway in national education issues, this bit of nose-thumbing at the Constitutional separation of Church and State is not trivial – instead, it’s a retreat from the third millennium to the first.

Secular and non-Christian parents in Texas must be thrilled to pay for religious indoctrination in their schools.  And perhaps the money should go instead to basic geography and geopolitics, as the next item shows:

3. McCain Looks at “Struggle” on the “Iraq-Pakistan Border”

So okay, forgive him on his internet illiteracy, his fifth-from-the-bottom GPA from the Naval Academy, his admitted “need for education” on economics.  As he says, he’s still better at foreign policy, right?

I hate to say “wrong,” but jeez, watch this 20-second interview clip and tell me how not to?

McCain: We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

–what else can I say, as a social studies teacher, but sheesh: wrong.  There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. (Unless he plans to create one by occupying Iran – surely the most justifiably nervous country on the planet. Sandwiched between the US occupation of Iraq on the west and of Afghanistan on the east, and sitting on some massive oil deposits, wouldn’t you be paranoid about your defense?)

Defenders will say this was maybe a slip-up, or his advisers are there to save us from his “knowledge”-base, or whatever, but I don’t buy it for two reasons: first, we’re seeing a pattern and a history of what I’ll politely call “deficient understanding of basic things” in this candidate; and second, we ignored similar warning signs from the last president and elected him based on his persona instead of his intelligence – and look where that got everybody.