Read all about it

Nick Anderson is a lucky guy to be working in Texas, which, for editorial cartoonists, is one of the most target-rich states in the union. (I checked Google News. No secession yet.)

The best part of this cartoon is the contrast between the stark figure being flogged and the dumb-but-happy yokel wielding the whip. Anderson could have depicted the "Texas Social Studies Textbooks" character as angry and vicious, but stupidly self-satisfied is, alas, almost certainly more accurate.

It's easy for cartoonists on either end of the spectrum to slip into dismissive shorthand with these caricatures and, for left-of-center commentary on race, the toothless inbred Southern moron is a standard figure.

However, it's such a stereotype that the insult to class and region becomes the point, and whatever else is in the cartoon becomes simply one more example of how stupid those conservative white Southerners are.

Cartoonists who rely on insults are much like stand-up comedians who do the same: The subject matter becomes irrelevant and their fans are there for the blood, not the insight.

"Stupidly self-satisfied" is a more devastating accusation, particularly when it is aimed at a textbook approval process supposedly headed by experts.

Texas is hardly the only example of a board of educational experts made up of theorists who have never been in the classroom plus former educators who did touch-and-go landings in actual schools a couple of decades ago.

I've covered school board meetings in which it was clear that the well-intentioned people making the decisions have never even simply sat in the back of the classroom to observe, or had lunch in the faculty lounge.

They are well-dressed, articulate, sincere people of inexplicable incompetence, and you almost welcome the occasional Tea Party firebrand who has the decency to be hostile as well as harmful, if only on the principal of "because thou art neither hot nor cold, I shall spit thee out."

The harm done by local school boards, of course, is local.

By contrast, as has been widely discussed, the incompetent ideologues who approve textbooks in Texas are, because of the market share they represent, guiding the textbooks used throughout the nation, at which point misrepresenting the Civil War and the Jim Crow era that followed is far more harmful and toxic than simply making their own kids ignorant, intolerant and socially irresponsible.

However, there is this ray of sunshine, in a Washington Post article on the issue: 

Critics of Texas’s new history standards fear that their teaching about the Civil War will spread to other states via textbooks that cater to the Lone Star state; Texas is the second-largest market in the country.

But that narrative appears to be changing as digital books help publishers become more nimble, said Jay Diskey of the Association of American Publishers.

A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”

The decline of print has all sorts of negative impacts, but that is a positive one: Purchasing regionally-customized digital textbooks allows throwback states to have states rights in their social studies texts, and creation in their biology texts and a geocentric cosmos in their earth science texts if they'd like, while kids elsewhere are being taught history and science.

It enables ignorance and miseducation, but does not mandate it.

Granted, we still face the Digital Divide and antediluvian school boards that can't understand the need to put laptops or at least tablets in the hands of all students.

I'm also wary of how textbooks-in-the-cloud will be priced and made available, given the predatory nature of the profiteering education companies that oversee testing, along with the experience artists and writers have had with Adobe, maker and hoarder of Photoshop, InDesign and other necessary tools of the trade.

But the move to digital texts at least holds out the promise that the bizarre situation in Texas will stay in Texas.

Though it's worth remembering that the false promises and outright lies of No Child Left Behind were spawned in Texas, and that the chief scam artist who took the plague national was from Nick Anderson's home town.

Lucky, lucky Nick.

 

Thick as a brick

Edison Lee may be riffing on Lego's announcement a few weeks ago that they are seeking to replace the plastic in their bricks with a type that is more sustainable.

Or John Hambrock may have simply been eating toaster waffles at a particularly creative moment. (I hear he's quite the chef!)

Now, Lego hasn't said they're seeking an edible substitute, or even a biodegradable one, and, yes, Orville, there is a difference.

Rather, they are trying to find a more sustainable form of plastic, and, as that linked article notes, one of the good things about plastic Legos is that they last nearly forever, and the company has been careful not to change the basic design, so that they remain compatible as well. 

Whatever the new stuff turns out to be, it will have to work with the existing bricks, or the old ones will start turning up in landfills and the Pacific garbage patch. I hope Lego recognizes this, and continues to think of it as a bad thing.

And, by the way, if you think Legos are in any danger of becoming obsolete as a toy, you must not know any kids at all, or even any former kids.

 

 
Coming to a theater near you. (Or on iTunes, or just stream it)

 

Print publication for your tablet

I'm modifying yesterday's rant about cartoons belonging on full-sized screens, because I've discovered that the National Cartoonists Society magazine is now being offered at GoComics, and, while I still don't think you should read on the phone (nice video link in yesterday's comments, by the way), I guess tablets would be okay for this.

Because mounting a flat screen in your bathroom would just be silly.

And you have to have a security clearance for a submersible laptop.

 

Comments

[Bookworm]

As a Texan, I cringe over the textbook situation. But I have to hope that as the kids grow up, they'll learn more real history. We did. Remember what they taught us, for instance, about Paul Revere's ride?

So much of history I relearned when I got past high school. Okay, a lot of kids won't do that and will become voters, but those kids aren't going to learn much IN school either. Can't win them all.