“Balanced literacy,” as any literate person exposed to it realizes, is neither “balanced” nor is it “literacy.” The entrepreneurs and contractors who coined the phrase, concocted the notions, launched the fad and marketed the hoax, parlaying it into an empire of a thousand cash cows and classroom straitjacketing schemes, are minor-league mischief makers compared to the peddlers of “Balanced Education for Everyone.”
According to the Denver Post, “Balanced Education for Everyone” is a “national campaign linked to an unsuccessful effort to remove the teaching of man-made global warming.” Its advocates are convinced that global warming, if it exists at all, is totally unrelated to any human behavior.
They do not consider abuse of the environment by the production of industrial waste to be a factor in global warming. Blaming corporations and other agents of pollution is “false science,” say these soccer moms and tea party-animals whose views are at odds with almost all the world’s experts.
The “Balanced Education for Everyone” folks are an alliance of conservatives who feel that major petroleum corporations deserve a little TLC rather than the indignity of government regulation. The group’s creator, the Independent Women’s Forum is reportedly funded by them. They’d rather see baby seals clubbed to death than Congress grill BP executives.
So what do they want?
They demand that the school curriculum be revised so that global warming is presented as an exclusively natural phenomenon and beyond the influence of human error, excess or irresponsibility. An officer of the Western Conservation Alliance actually petitioned a school board to forbid the teaching of man-made global warming. The more moderate wing of the movement would allow equal billing of both views. But that would be like creationism and evolution auditing each other in a syllabus.
The school board wisely rejected the demand and the Balanced Education for Everyone website has suddenly and inexplicably been shut down, perhaps coincidentally. Too bad for ResistNet.com, which dubs itself the “Home of the Patriotic Resistance.” They had recently been directing their supporters to the defunct site.
But this story is made up of more than the sum of its narrative details. Its implications are far-reaching and disturbing.
They point to the extreme danger of scientific or historic truth being doctored to suit a dominant ideology. When truth cannot stand for and by itself, any “assistance” provided it, no matter how righteously motivated, adulterates and corrupts it. All reality becomes vulnerable to revision and with it the lessons they carry, which in the case of slavery and other abominations of the chronicles of mankind, such as the Holocaust, may be, if we choose to learn, their only collateral benefits.
Self-styled “conservatives” are the culprits in the Balanced Education for Everyone case. They feel that they have a monopoly on patriotism because they have selected the version of events that best serves the country (comports with their bias) they profess to love.
Truth, of course, knows no partisanship but rather “lets the chips fall where they may.” And “progressives” are every bit as proud of nationhood but at the same time no more immune (though probably less prone) to folly and intolerance than “conservatives.”
With their website now as closed as their minds, what will the unbalanced “Balanced Education for Everyone” folks think up next? Do the planets really revolve around the sun or is that “false science” like global warming?
1 Comment:
1 Bob Calder
· Jul 17, 2010 at 11:15 am
It would be lovely if conservative reformers jump on this and demand it from legislators. Simply lovely.
Perhaps if it were partnered with an “oil is good for you” campaign…