BuckFutter

I was wondering if any of you had heard about this case where a high school kid reported his AMERICAN GOVERNMENT textbook had a conservative bias. The textbook is used in many highschool AP classes and was written by two college proffessors. Doesn't this just fly in the face of all the right wing fanatics that foam at the mouth about how liberal the colleges and proffessors that teach at them are? Has there ever been one single case where a student was able to show that there was a definite liberal political slant to a textbook? Among other things the book has the following quote about global warming:

"science doesn't know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all."

Yeah, that's not an attempt to force erroneous views on our impressionable youth at all.

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B-continum

Umm...I don't know about the other stuff in that book, but there is disagreement between scientists about global warming and climate change. They're not sure if it's just a naturally occuring phenomenon or human-driven.

What other things in the textbook show the conservative bias?

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duck

Its my experience that the entire AP series has a decidedly center/right slant. I wouldn't call it a bias, in that students are encouraged to exercise their critical thinking skills and challenge the text books in this series of courses.

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BuckFutter

Among the vast majority of scientists there is agreement that the warming trend is at least being accellerated by human activity if not being caused by it. There are some that disagree. And there are some scientists that will swear that smoking doesn't cause cancer and that evolution is not a proven fact.

heres a link to one of the articles: http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/jersey...700.xml&coll=1

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goodgirl iam

In my high school history class, we were forced to watch The Patriot to place stuff we were learning in 'context'.

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greywolf90

i just took high school government and economics. i don't know about the text books (we barely used them), but both of my teachers were really conservative, and what they taught us was definately bias. basically everyone left the class thinking liberals = idiots, unless they were able to filter out the teacher's bias. as for myself, i don't really have an affilliation for either side. i take a liberal stance on some issues and a conservative stance on others.

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debdodd

Good! a free thinker is what I like to see/hear from our youth ... think .... do not go with populist beliefs .... research and develop your own thoughts on issues .... do not vote "party", vote for the person .... thinking for yourself not what your teachers/professors think you should believe ... no more drones needed ...

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NotConvinced

That alone says very little. I can say my speed on the highway is increasing by .0005 mph but it won't really matter for quite some time. To say that human activity has had no effect on the entire system that is Earth, is quite laughable. To say in the midst of a warming trend that human activity has had a reverse cooling effect on the system is quite ludicrous (without solid data). So on the logical relevance of your claim, it really doesn't tell us that much info at all to say that a vast majority don't think human activity contributes to global cooling, but global warming.

How far do you intend to go with this? Some with your point of view go as far as to liken anthropogenic global warming critics to holocaust deniers, I assume you're not one of those...?
Also, evolution is not a proven fact, just like gravity isn't a proven fact. Both are Scientific Theories that describes systems in which facts contribute to form reasonably conclusive findings.

But to address the original claim that there is something wrong with this statement:
The mention of dangerous level is good. What scientific evidence does this overwhelming scientific consensus have that shows we're approaching/have approached a "dangerous level" of global warming? The following questions don't necessarily have the easy answers the majority of the public thinks they have:
1) Is the current warming trend Not part of a larger natural cycle the Earth goes through?
2) If it's abnormal, then how much is human activity contributing?
3) Do we know what the "tipping point" is, and how far we are from it/passed it?
4) If it's abnormal and we're not at the tipping point, is there anything human activity can do to change this abnormal warming trend, and if there is, is it enough to prevent us from going over the tipping point?

I believe that the media already has the majority of the US public believing that Question 4 can be answered with 2 Yes's. Scientifically speaking, they don't have any grounds for believing that. We don't even have enough scientific data to conclude that the answer to Question 1 is undeniably Yes.

Many people in the end are basing their beliefs on computer models, and what they're predicting. Simply put, these same models haven't been shown to be precisely reliable. In the past 5 years they've predicted some of our hurricane seasons to be more powerful than they actually were.

Why do people believe it so readily? One guess...it's just too Hollywood of a story to pass up. "We're to blame, we haven't been responsible, we better clean up our act or it's doomsday." It's some of the same self-blame thinking that semi-encourages people to believe in God and the concept of sin.

Big picture, I agree we should take claims of bias seriously, to an extent. Once an idea enters a textbook, it takes on a life of it's own whether it's true or not, fact or not.

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PsiCop

As a rule, most of the time when someone complains about "bias," what they really mean is that whoever wrote/produced/created/approved the book/show/whatever, didn't do so in the precise manner they want it to have been done. That is, people equate disagreement with "bias," as if the only possible reason someone might disagree with them, is because that person is prematurely and irrationally "biased" against them.

Discerning a true bias in something like a textbook requires a careful, meticulous analysis of numerous points contained within it ... as in, thousands. (Most textbooks contain many facts and might, just might, provide that many.) Establishing "bias" is actually a statistical enterprise requiring a large sample, a VERY large one. I know of no high school kid who's capable of dissecting a textbook to the degree required. Even if s/he were capable of the number-crunching involved, distilling out the thousands of facts contained in a textbook in order to establish bias, AND knowing the veracity and tangent of each, is an exercise far beyond a high schooler's skills.

Besides, I question whether or not a high schooler would even understand the notion of "bias." I have no doubt that this kid is merely a publicity-stunt mouthpiece for a bunch of adults.

Further muddying the issue is that many textbooks are actually written by committees and in small pieces at a time, sometimes in isolation and over a long period of time ... even if only one or two authors are listed as having "written" them. Editing fiascos are also common, such as passages which should be updated over time but which are neglected, and don't reflect the times.

The "committee effect" means that the two scientists listed as the book's "authors" might not actually have written that passage at all, neither in the past nor recently.
It depends on when that part of the textbook was written. If that passage was written 10 or 15 years ago it might have been an honest writing and not "biased." If this sounds like excuse-making, it's not intended to be; it's a very serious and real phenomenon in the textbook industry. You would be surprised at the number of factual errors in textbooks, the result of mistakes which are never caught, or as I suggested, portions which were written long ago and never updated. These errors are not "bias," I've seen things like "Saturn is the largest planet in the solar system," which obviously is not a politically-motivated mistake. It's just a mistake.

Hopefully you're getting the idea that textbook writing and publishing is an atrocious affair. It's worse even than I can convey to you in a single post ... and again, the problems are NOT in "bias" but in sloppiness, poor content management, boiler-room writing, slipshod fact-checking, etc. I tend to attribute problems found in them to incompetence and oversight, rather than clever and subtle machination. The former is much more likely in that business than the latter.

greywolf90

while this is possible, i think you are grossly underestimating high schoolers. yes there are students who could fit your description, but i have many classmates who are college level. i think that for some of us, being in high school is really a waste of time. this is why they offer AP courses: so that we can at least get some college credit while we are wasting our time. anyways, i'm assuming that this student is a junior or a senier, so if this is the type of student who makes good grades and is already planning out college, then i am certain that they understand what bias is (especially if they have taken a statistics class). also, i think your idea of the student being a mouthpiece for adults is not so likely for high schoolers as it is for elementary or middle schoolers. parents tend to be more involved with their child early in education (PTA etc.), but to my experience, most parents are barely aware of anything that goes on with their child in high school. you know what happens when those teenage hormones kick in.

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