Carcharoth wrote:
[Correcting previous post - can't Wikipedia have editable posts?]
On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Sat, Mar 28, 2009 at 12:48 PM, Charlotte Webb charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Nationalism is a major factor in school social studies curricula, and a great medium for indoctrinating the child with official truth. Access to Wikipedia and other on-line sources helps him to formulate the questions that needed to challenge the teachers of those truths.
History textbooks tend to lie by omission but the board of education will be loathe to approve anything that explicitly encourages students to look elsewhere for the director's cut. They don't want to deal with the fallout when students report back to class asking why their curriculum bears no mention of the Mỹ Lai massacre, the bombing of Dresden, Operation Northwoods, the Bonus Army, the School of the Americas handbook, Martin Luther King's FBI fan-mail, Jonestown, or the Tuskegee Study, etc. Indeed, who would?
Doesn't that make the "board of education" part of the problem?
Carcharoth
So, replace all such specialist elected and accountable bodies (or bodies accountable to the elected) with a wiki? Replace the expert, who wrote the textbook, with the anarchy of the truth according to whoever made the last edit?
I think I'll stay off the koolaid and stick with democracy, professionalism, and expertise - yes it can be, on some occasions, stupid, biased and myopic, but it is still the best system we've got.