

4th grade school textbook tries to explain electricity, gives up - kevinrpope
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/christian_4th_grade_school_textbook_tries_to_explain_electricity/

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marshray
I agree that it's a ridiculous textbook, but these "point and laugh at the
stupid believers" articles get a bit tiring sometimes.

I'm in Kansas, a typical family goes to church on Sunday. There are a _lot_ of
Christians around here, but I've never come across such a science textbook
(you can bet I would have picked it up and looked it in if I had).

To mean anything, the article really should at least _try_ to put some kind of
figure on the number of kids actually being educated from this book today. I'm
pretty sure it's the exception rather than the rule among Christians to
endorse that kind of silly science.

It almost looks like these scientists go out to find the weirdest possible
examples they can (and there are some weird ones) and then hold them up as a
representative sample. Not a good example of how science should work.

I can't resist linking to this classic article about how even the conventional
descriptions of electricity "moves from the negative to the positive" are
basically wrong: <http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html>

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beej71
This book is so over the top, I almost can't imagine it's real, but...

> I can't resist linking to this classic article about how even the
> conventional descriptions of electricity "moves from the negative to the
> positive" are basically wrong

Or how Ohm's Law or Newton's Universal Law of Gravitation are wrong, for that
matter.

But there are varying degrees of wrong, and neither the true direction of
charged particles nor superconductors nor relativity can make our sample
infractions remotely competitive with those in this book.

And even if they were of the same caliber of wrong, it would not make any of
it more right. Kids would be better off simply reading the Bible passages, and
not being exposed to the rest of it.

