Poor textbooks are nothing new, not exclusive to the United States, and are actually the symptom of a much bigger problem than bad science.

While this article on just how dumb American school textbooks are makes a lot of noise about how awful things are now, I can state quite categorically this is nothing new. People were making the same "horrible discovery" of politically correct groupthink about the textbooks we used in High School 20 years ago, and they were actually much better than drivel used in the late '60s and early '70s. To this day I'm mildly surprised to read a history book that says something good about Western civilization without immediately qualifying it with something horrible.

But it's not just the US. Japan's version of PC-as-education (the whole "Pearl Harbor was a strike against Western imperialism that resulted in Japan's vicitmization with atomic weaponry" theme) regularly gets it into hot water with its neighbors. We won't even start about what a classroom in Egypt, India, or Russia is stocked with.

The bottom line is when you politicize something it will be politics, not rationality or scientific veracity or even basic common sense, that will rule the day. Government is run by whatever set of busybodies happen to be ascendent in any particular region at any particular time, and those busybodies will be the ones who set the agendas for the schools. And don't get all huffy about fundamentalist wackos teaching kids about Noah and the ark. For every loon you show me trying to wedge Genesis into a science text book I will quite easily show you a loon trying to wedge Paul Erlich into the same space.

Is there a solution? It's hard to say. There have been dozens, perhaps hundreds, of experiments in "good" public schooling in the roughly century-and-a-half it has existed. Unfortunately, such experiments are far more contingent on how effective they are as a lever to drive a wedge of political belief around than they are on how well they teach Alan and Betty to read. Hence the ones that actually get a shot nearly always fail, sometimes disastrously, while others that make immenent sense but are essentially a-political are never tried at all.

Higher education is even worse, since tenure has largely sheltered dinosaurs whose political beliefs (socialism, post-modernism, environmentalism, nihilism, fundamentalism, etc.) have elsewhere succumbed to the gigantic asteroid impact of the 20th century. Keep in mind we actually pay extra to allow these fossils-in-the-making to "educate" our children.

In the end I think, as with anything government touches, the best we can hope for is not "best-practice", but rather "least-worst", and even that will come only through constant struggle. This is not as depressing as it may at first sound. America has been muddling through with a least-worst school system for the past 150 years, and we've done pretty well over the long haul.

But it doesn't mean we should stop trying. The loons may twirl to the right or to the left as they bark madly in the night, but make no mistake, they are out there.

And they'll take our children if we let them.