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An educational foundation in the UK has announced plans to distribute to high schools a free book that highlights the scientific and cultural legacies of Muslim civilization. 1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World is the creation of the Foundation for Science Technology and Civilization (FSTC), a Manchester-based organization set up to raise awareness of the contributions of the Muslim world to modern civilization. FSTC said the contribution that Muslim and other civilizations have made to the modern world has been widely overlooked and that its team of academics has focused on debunking the myth of the so-called "Dark Ages...

QUANTICO, Va., April 13, 2009 – The U.S. military’s rescue of a kidnapped American ship captain yesterday was “textbook,” but the issue of piracy is likely to worsen in the absence of a systemic solution, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said today. Off the Somali coast yesterday, U.S. special operations snipers on the USS Bainbridge shot and killed three pirates who had held hostage the captain of the Maersk-Alabama cargo ship on a lifeboat for five days. Military officials said Capt. Richard Phillips’ life was in imminent danger at the time of his rescue. “It was textbook,” Gates said of...

Islamofascism: A new study confirms our "ally" Saudi Arabia is still poisoning young Muslim minds with anti-Western textbooks. So? Its hate-filled graduates are enrolling at our colleges.The Hudson Institute reviewed the 2007-08 textbooks distributed by the Saudi Ministry of Education and found that, despite promised reforms, the kingdom still teaches students to "hate the infidels." The texts assert that it's "permissible" for a Muslim to kill an "apostate," an "adulterer," a "homosexual," as well as non-Muslims practicing "polytheism," or Christianity. The violent ideology is introduced in a religion textbook in the first grade and reinforced and developed in following years...

WASHINGTON — Two years after protracted American-Saudi negotiations persuaded the State Department that the Saudis would remove religious intolerance from their national textbooks, a new study finds the books still portray non-Sunni Muslims as the enemies of true believers. The report from the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute finds that the Saudi textbooks are filled with the austere supremacism of the Wahhabi sect of Islam, despite promises from the Kingdom in 2006 to alter them. For example, a textbook for 10th graders on Islamic jurisprudence not only says it is permissible in Islam to murder a homosexual,...

After two decades of unconscionable increases in tuition and fees, colleges and universities increasingly are employing a new scam to swindle students and their parents out of whatever pennies they have left: the custom textbook. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, publishers make a few minor tweaks to a standard textbook, jack up the price and sell the special edition to the captive thousands who are required to buy it for required courses. For example, the University of Alabama requires all 4,000 of its freshmen to pay $59.35 for a spiral-bound special edition of "A Writer's Reference." The university's...

WASHINGTON — Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded. They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools.

LONDON (AFP) - The British government is to investigate a school funded by Saudi Arabia's government involved in a row over textbooks allegedly describing Jews as "monkeys" and Christians as "pigs", the Times has reported. The King Fahad Academy in west London has already said it will remove the disputed chapters from the books in question, which it said were used as "secondary sources". It claims the controversy arose from a misinterpretation of the Koran-based material and stresses it does not teach hatred. But schools minister Jim Knight has said he wants reassurance that the school is complying with requirements...

/begin my translation What is inside N. Korean Textbook for First Grade in Elementary School [2006-08-25] The textbook for first grade Korean in N. Korean elementary school, published by N. Korean Educational Books Publishing in 2005(Juche 94)  Kids studying so-called "Slogan Tree." (my note: N. Koreans are taught that Kim Il-sung carved trees all over the country in order to encourage people to rise up against Japanese oppression. It is a sheer fabrication cooked up for their propaganda.) The text says, "Elder sister tells us one at a time. She tells us, while pointing at a Slogan Tree." The slogan on the tree says, "Long...

SACRAMENTO Caught in a political dustup over English-learning students and their own philosophical divide, members of the state Board of Education decided Wednesday to put their trust in the state's top political leaders to restore funding after the body was stripped of its entire operating budget. The loss of the board's $1.6 million annual staff budget came as political retaliation for its split vote in April not to allow alternative textbooks for English-learner students. The board rejected pleas from bilingual education advocates to allow schools to use different textbooks for students learning English. That vote angered the Democratic Latino Caucus,...

ADF filed friend-of-the-court brief in defense of textbook stickers which accurately stated that evolution is a theory ATLANTA — The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit today vacated a lower court decision that declared Cobb County science textbook stickers which stated “evolution is a theory, not a fact” unconstitutional. The court was critical of the district court for issuing its ruling against the stickers despite holes in the evidentiary record in the case and remanded the case back to the district court for new proceedings. “No school should be in trouble for simply stating the facts. That’s what...

A TEXTBOOK used at schools in the Indian state of Rajasthan compares housewives to donkeys, and suggests the animals make better companions as they complain less and are more loyal to their "masters", The Times of India reported today. "A donkey is like a housewife ... In fact, the donkey is a shade better, for while the housewife may sometimes complain and walk off to her parents' home, you'll never catch the donkey being disloyal to his master," the newspaper reported, quoting a Hindi-language primer meant for 14-year-olds. The book was approved by the state's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party...

Pakistan deletes 'pro-Bush' poem Mr Bush (left) is a key backer of President Musharraf Pakistan's government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out "President George W Bush".The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds.Critics say it praises Mr Bush. Its rhyming couplets describe someone "solid as steel, strong in his faith".Officials cannot explain how the poem entered the curriculum. Pupils are to ignore it ahead of a reprint next year.Not deliberate'The BBC's Zaffar Abbas in Islamabad says it...

I know that this may be a long read, there's a lot of content here, but I think that many FReepers will find the information here interesting and disturbing. I will appreciate any help I can get with this situation. My wife and I have been homeschooling our children since they started schooling. We have 5th, 6th, and 8th graders. Recently, we made the tough decision to enroll them in a local Charter School. In Arizona, a Charter School is a privately run, smaller, more focused public school. It provides parents with school choice and some competition between the schools....

Publisher says Bible textbook respects both facts and faith NEW VOLUME IS AIMED AT PUBLIC SCHOOLS By Richard N. Ostling Associated Press Posted on Fri, Sep. 23, 2005 An interfaith group released a new textbook Thursday aimed at teaching public high school students about the Bible while avoiding legal and religious disputes. The non-profit Bible Literacy Project of Fairfax, Va., spent five years and $2 million developing ``The Bible and Its Influence.'' The textbook, introduced at a Washington news conference, won initial endorsements from experts in literature, religion and church-state law. American Jewish Congress attorney Marc Stern, an adviser on...

The London Arabic-language daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat has published a report by Huda Jasim on changes made to Iraqi schoolbooks following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. The new schoolbooks will be introduced with the start of the 2005/6 school year in September. According to the report, the Iraqi education minister formed a committee of senior educators and specialists to reexamine the country's school curricula for the new Iraq. The committee proposed substantial changes to be made to the school textbooks, with the aim of completely eradicating the Saddam personality cult and placing considerably less emphasis on the Ba'th Party than...

China confiscates textbooks over 'wrong' colored TaiwanChinese authorities in Dalian confiscated more than 120 educational books that a Japanese school imported from Japan, on the grounds that some books showed Taiwan as a separate country from mainland China, it was learned Tuesday. Officials at the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said that it was the first time that one of the eight Japanese schools in China had had educational materials seized by Chinese authorities. Customs duties officials in Dalian seized 128 social studies books, which the Japanese school there imported for the 2005 school year that...

Sunday May 08, 2005 LOS ANGELES (AP) Louis Leithold, who wrote one of the most widely used calculus textbooks and helped change the way the subject is taught, has died. He was 80. Leithold was found dead April 29 at his Los Angeles home by the parent of a worried student. The coroner's office said he died of natural causes. Leithold wrote ``The Calculus,'' which became a standard text and was credited with changing the way the subject is studied. The book, first published in 1968, is widely used in high schools and universities and is in its seventh printing....

Japan Criticizes China History Textbooks By JOSEPH COLEMANAssociated Press Writer Chinese residents in Japan hold banners denouncing the Chinese communist party during an anti-Chinese communist party rally at a Tokyo park Sunday, April. 24, 2005. Hundreds of Chinese protesters rallied in support of the Japanese government. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye) Height (pixels): 512 Width (pixels): 363 TOKYO -- Japan opened a new front in its dispute with China on Sunday by sharply criticizing Beijing's history textbooks, signaling continued friction between the Asian powers despite high-profile diplomatic moves to quell tensions. Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura refuted Chinese claims that Japanese...

I'm teaching an Environmental Science course in a NYC high school. The textbook I'm using is about 10 years old, so it has some stuff about off-road vehicles, but not so much about gas-guzzling SUVs. I've come right out and told my students that some things that appear in the book look like they were written by whackos who care for the environment first and people second, and I've told them that I would let help them separate fact from hype. So I was stunned when I saw the following passage in the textbook. It was in a sidebar article...

Beijing blacks out anti-Japan protests By Antoaneta Bezlova BEIJING - As anti-Japanese protests continued for a third day in a row Tuesday, government censors imposed a news blackout on coverage of protests, signaling that Beijing was trying to contain further damage to already strained Sino-Japanese relations. None of the nation's thousands of newspapers, television stations and news websites carried any details of the protests that took the capital by storm on Saturday. On Sunday, hundreds of full-gear riot police blocked access to the diplomatic quarter in downtown Beijing, but avoided direct confrontation with protesters. In sharp contrast with the full...