At 10:56 03-01-01 -0800, Joshua wrote:
>"Alberto Monteiro" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > John Garcia wrote:
> > >
> > >>So? That just proves my point, that br youth is massively
> > >>taught to hate the USA - even with lies. I don't know about
> > >>other Latino American countries, but I suspect that things
> > >>are not different.
> > >
> > >they may not be. so, why should Brazilian educators teach lies about
> > >another country, even one so hated as "El Norte"?
> > >
> > "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result
> > from stupidity." Maybe they believe things that make the USA more evil
> > than it is :-)
>
>And early educators are notoriously ill-informed. When my wife was getting
>Montessori certification we were both stunned at some of the bogus science
>being taught as gospel to teachers who would then blindly pass it on to
>1st-grade children. The one that sticks with me is "turtles evolved from
>ankylosaurs".
And Glyptodon was an intermediate step.
> *shudder* That's the sort of thing that you invent on your own
>when you're 4 and looking at books; it's your early teachers that need to be
>correcting such things, not reinforcing them.
>
>I think most of our biases come from misconceptions learned as young
>children (< age 8). Anything learned before that age has got to be very hard
>to compensate for. Young kids are going to pick up things like bogus science
>or an anti-American bias at a very young age and never overcome that unless
>forced to - I know I thought the US was EEEEEEVIL through at least Grade 9.
>
>Many of my friends from university still think I've sold out, but that could
>be working for Microsoft rather than living in the US. :)
>
>On a tangent* (I like those), I recommend binge-reading a bunch of Robert L.
>Forward books. Since doing that a year or two ago it's become a bit of a
>habit to view the world around me as physics-in-progress, seeing momentum
>transfers and envisioning the effects of air pressure in common scenarios.
>In retrospect, a pretty cool high-school physics text would be a near-future
>SF novel annotated with equations.
Or just give them one of Gregory Benford's stories as is, with the
equations already in there.
>* When Susan and I drive to Oregon to visit her parents we pass through a
>town called Tangent, leading to the inevitable jokes about turning off.
Remember, the Good Lord was talking to Noah about something else when He
brought up the subject of the flood, thus leading the conversation off on
an arctangent . . .
-- Ronn! :)
