Lies: the bigger, the better

Texas is back in the news. By an accident of population, schools administrators in Texas have a remarkable degree of control over the content of the textbooks used in public schools all over the country. Most recently, they are using this power to remove from textbooks any mention of the use of contraceptives for preventing pregnancy and the transmission of sexual diseases.

Naturally, I'm delighted, because this sort of thing makes my job easier. Here's how it works... the more lies and omissions there are in the textbooks, and the more obvious and glaring they are, the sooner the students will realize they are being lied to. And that's the first step of a process that goes something like this:

1) Realize that you are being lied to.

2) Examine and understand the sources of those lies.

3) Learn to distinguish reliable and unreliable sources.

4) Recognize that all sources are unreliable in some ways and in some degree.

5) Learn to construct reliable information from unreliable sources.

One of the most important goals of a college education is to get students to Step 5 before they graduate. Unfortunately, many of them never get there. Some never take Step 1. They think that education is an information transfer process, and that professors are the source of the information. They may learn the material, but they never master the process.

Another common failure mode is the Step 4 Pit of Despair. Overwhelmed by human fallibility, many students give up, leaving college with the lesson that there are no truths and no ways of creating reliable knowledge about the world.

It takes some time to get your brain through these steps. People start at different times and progress at different speeds, but almost no one can get from Step 1 to Step 5 in less than two or three years. So, the sooner you get started, the better.

Well, thanks to the Texas Board of Education, a lot of high school students are going to get off to an early start.

The National Science Teachers Association has an excellent article on The Trouble with Textbooks.

There are a number of books on this topic, too. I've read The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Diane Ravitch, but it was not great. What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America by Joan Delfattore, looks better, but I haven't read it.

WARNING: The information in this book represents our best scientific understanding of the world at the time of publication, and is subject to revision as more evidence and alternative theories become available. To varying degrees, the facts and theories presented here have been evaluated and endorsed by the scientific community, using empirical evidence that is available to the public to the extent that is practical. In some cases, a theory that has withstood rigorous testing and produced sufficiently useful and accurate predictions comes to be regarded as fact. Nevertheless, all scientific ideas are subject to scrutiny and possible improvement; the diligent reader is encouraged to consider other theories that may explain better the data that are available, or make more useful or accurate predictions.