Richard Feynman tries to improve school textbooks | Hacker News Reader

Richard Feynman tries to improve school textbooks

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21 pointspyinstallwoes14 comments

I see this circulating almost yearly now and the story never gets old. This is a huge hole in the public education system that needs to be fixed, but how do you fix it without people screaming that the big scary government is brainwashing your kids?

Every American should have access to the same quality public education. :(

Open source text books are really a very obvious destination for all this, get 'big text book' out of the way and level the playing field for all.

https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/poland-pioneer...

I appologies to those that will invariably be triggered by the soros funded cucked liberal open society foundation, but it was the first link that came up when I was looking for open text books for schools.

I am sure there are a few other initiatives out there as well.

Maybe start with low-grade English and math textbooks? If the book's editor is a bit savvy about hot buttons, I'd guess that rather few cultural warriors have strong feelings about adding fractions, distinguishing adverbs from adjectives, etc. And "eagerly engaging" the anti-big-government types on the tedious details of such subjects might soon drive them away.

(No, this approach could not be extended to American history, science, etc. But some good could be done.)

Just think how much time gets wasted by every teacher writing a lesson plan, pop quizes, tests etc. Why not share the resources and spend the time doing more, or just do nothing instead.

Step 1, start firing the teachers who are actively trying to brainwash your kids.

People keep acting as if public distrust in our institutions is the problem without stepping back and asking if those institutions are trustworthy to begin with.

Step 2, realise teachers are not actively trying to brainwash your kids

I watched politicians say they were going to ban teaching CRT, then teachers say that CRT was a conspiracy theory, then said politicians actually ban the teaching of CRT, followed up by teachers publically saying they will continue to teach CRT against the law all in the course of 2ish months in my school district.

If you don't think teachers are trying to actively brainwash kids, you're choosing to ignore the evidence

> politicians say they were going to ban teaching CRT, then teachers say that CRT was a conspiracy theory

So a partisan hysterical mob scream about banning the teaching of something that isnt being taught.

Due to partisan hysterical screaming and freedom of speech violating bans, people start talking about it, and say well lets go ahead and teach it.

Let me go waayyy out on a limb here - would you like to ban the teaching of evolution in schools and replace it with creationism by any chance?

Teaching science really would be intentionally trying to go behind parents back and brainwashing their children.

Did you miss the part where after the banning, the teachers admitted they were teaching and would continue to teach CRT?

Can you enlighten me what CRT is. Cathode Ray Tube is about the only thing I can think of, and no big conspiracy there.

Critical Race Theory, or the teaching that whites are uniquely the source of all problems in the world.

Or alternatively that disadvantaged people are often disadvantaged even in theoretically corrective procedures (AKA legal settings).

Regardless of your views on CRT, the fact that teachers lied about teaching it to parents and then chose to break the law by teaching it after they were called out confirms that yes, they are intentionally trying to go behind parents back in what they teach kids.

In my opinion the problem is simply terminology. Critical Race Theory is a niche law school topic. Just because a teacher wants to teach something approaching the reality of slavery or the treatment of indigenous peoples is not teaching CRT.

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