Alla som har sett på Jay Leno någon gång vet att de ibland har ett inslag som kallas för ”Jay walking”, och det går ut på att Jay Leno ställer en massa frågor till förbipasserande. Frågorna brukar i regel bara kräva allmänbildning, ändå misslyckas många med att svara rätt på frågorna. Nu tror jag förvisso inte att alla Jay Leno stöter ihop med är så oallmänbildade som de som får komma med i det färdigredigerade inslaget. Men det är egentligen irrelevant. Poängen är att de finns och att de tycks vara relativt många. Jag har en en tänkbar teori till varför relativt många amerikaner är framstår som så oallmänbildade: de har inte lärt någonting vettigt medan de gick i skolan. Och hur kommer det sig? En del av svaret är: Politiskt korrekthet. Jag skojar inte. Det finns många bevis för det, men nyligen stötte jag ihop med en hel dröse av intressanta observationer. I artikeln A Textbook Case of Junk Science frågar sig Pamela R. Winnick vad är man lär ut till barnen. Så vad upptäckte hon? Låt mig citera:

…there’s lots that’s puzzling about the science textbooks used in American classrooms. A sloppy way with facts, a preference for the politically correct over the scientifically sound, and sheer faddism characterize their content. It’s as if their authors had decided above all not to expose students to the intellectual rigor that is the lifeblood of science. Thus, a chapter on climate in a fifth-grade science textbook in the Discovery Works series, published by Houghton Mifflin (2000), opens with a Native American explanation for the changing seasons: ”Crow moon is the name given to spring because that is when the crows return. April is the month of Sprouting Grass Moon.” Students meander through three pages of Algonquin lore before they learn that climate is affected by the rotation and tilt of Earth–not by the return of the crows.

Affirmative action for women and minorities is similarly pervasive in science textbooks, to absurd effect. Al Roker, the affable black NBC weatherman, is hailed as a great scientist in one book in the Discovery Works series. It is common to find Marie Curie given a picture and half a page of text, but her husband, Pierre, who shared a Nobel Prize with her, relegated to the role of supportive spouse. In the same series, Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb, is shown next to black scientist Lewis Latimer, who improved the light bulb by adding a carbon filament. Edison’s picture is smaller.

Jews have been awarded 22 percent of all Nobel Prizes in science, but readers of Houghton Mifflin’s fifth-grade textbooks won’t get wind of that. Navajo physicist Fred Begay, however, merits half a page for his study of Navajo medicine. Albert Einstein isn’t mentioned. Biologist Clifton Poodry has made no noteworthy scientific discoveries, but he was born on the Tonawanda Seneca Indian reservation, so his picture is shown in Glenco/McGraw-Hill’s Life Science (2002), a middle-school biology textbook. The head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Maurice H.F. Wilkins, and Francis Crick aren’t named.

Men Winnick går ett steg vidare och berättar mer i detalj hur det går till när man köper in böcker:

If it’s the states that impose multiculturalism, however, they’re only doing the bidding of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1995, the academy published the National Science Education Standards, which, according to academy president Bruce Alberts, ”represent the best thinking . . . about what is best for our nation’s students.” The standards (which explicitly place religion on a par with ”myth and superstition”) counsel school boards to modify ”assessments” for students with ”limited English proficiency” by, for example, raising their scores. They tell teachers to be ”sensitive” to students who are ”economically deprived, female, have disabilities, or [come] from populations underrepresented in the sciences.” Teachers should especially encourage ”women and girls, students of color and students with disabilities.”

This ”best thinking” of the nation’s scientific elite is being used by nearly all the 50 states as they centralize their science standards. With 22 states now requiring statewide adoption of textbooks, big-state textbook markets are the prizes for which publishers compete.

Vad har detta för praktiska konsekvenser?

A study commissioned by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation in 2001 found 500 pages of scientific error in 12 middle-school textbooks used by 85 percent of the students in the country. One misstates Newton’s first law of motion. Another says humans can’t hear elephants. Another confuses ”gravity” with ”gravitational acceleration.” Another shows the equator running through the United States. Individual scientists draft segments of these books, but reviewing the final product is sometimes left to multicultural committees who have no expertise in science… A study by the National Assessment governing board in 2000 found that only 12 percent of graduating seniors were proficient in science. International surveys continue to show that American high school seniors rank 19th among seniors surveyed in 21 countries.

Men det finns fler exempel på hur politisk korrekthet förstör utbildningen. Låt mig citera ur C. Bradley Thompsons artikel The Historians vs. American History:

It is now obvious that American children know very little about the history of their own nation. This past year the U.S. Department of Education released its History Report Card and the results were predictably awful: 57 percent of high school seniors flunked even a basic knowledge of American history, and only 10 percent tested at grade level.

…

I recently attended the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, the nation’s largest and most influential organization of academic historians. What goes on at this meeting will eventually make its way into your child’s classroom. I was shocked by what I saw and heard.

Of the roughly two hundred panels, there was virtually nothing on subjects such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, or America’s involvement in the two World Wars. Instead, there were dozens of papers on subjects ranging from the banal to the bizarre and perverse.

Participants were subjected to scintillating presentations on topics such as ”Meditations on a Coffee Pot: Visual Culture and Spanish America, 1520-1820,” or ”The Joys of Cooking: Ideologies of Housework in Early Modern England,” or ”Body, Body, Burning Bright: Cremation in Victorian America.”

But without question the dominant theme of the conference was sex. Historians at America’s best universities are obsessed with it.

One historian from an Ivy League college delivered a paper on ”Strong Hard Filth and the Aroma of Washington Square: Art, Homosexual Life, and Postal Service Censorship in the Ulysses Obscenity Trial of 1921.” Another scholar from Berkeley spoke on ”Solitary Self/Solitary Sex.” And one spoke on ”Constructing Masculinity: Homosexual Sodomy, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Penetrative Manhood in Early Modern Spain.”

But historians’ obsession with sex is the least of their vices. Academic history has become thoroughly egalitarian. It seeks to elevate the history of ordinary men and women doing ordinary things at the expense of great men and women doing great things. Thus, the history department at Harvard University no longer offers a course on the American Revolution. In its place, it now offers a course on the history of midwives and quilting.

…

Ultimately, academic history is driven by a hatred of America and its ideals. It is common these days for students to be told that the colonization of North America represents an act of genocide; that the Founding Fathers were racist, sexist, ”classist,” ”homophobic,” Euro-centric bigots; that the winning of the American West was an act of capitalist pillage; that the so-called ”Robber Barons” forced widows and orphans into the streets; that hidden in the closets of most white Americans is a robe and hood.

To help put over this slander, historians dissolve American history into a chaotic hodge-podge of trivial stories about politically correct victim groups. It is no wonder that our children no longer learn the truly important facts about their nation’s history.

Politiskt korrekthet är alltså inte bara dumt, det ser också till att fördumma allmänheten.