My Mad Fixations

Someone commented on my recent posting about Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum (PAC) and my refusal of an offered advertisement from them. She thinks that -- oh, well, hell, I don't want to paraphrase for fear I'll be told I misquoted someone; so, as it wasn't a private email, I'll just repost it here in its entirety:
 
"I want to clarify some things. I do not work for PAC, never have, never will. I am about as atheist as they come and have been for some time. I am vehemently against religious agenda of any kind.And yet, I've used PAC, their full course and I loved it. Their English and History are spot on and thorough and their math, while a bit jumpy, is very solid. I never saw any of the things you've mentioned and I've not only spoke to the guy on the phone, but met him in person and he is nothing but genuine. They are not bigots or religious fanatics. I think the things you've chosen to hyperfocus on as being 'problems', really are not.Of course you are entitled to you opinion and you should(rightly) choose proper advertising for your readers. But I think this one time you might be slightly off in your assumptions about a company."
 
I didn't make any assumptions about PAC. I did what I've done with every other potential advertiser:  I went to their site and checked out their product.

A friend of mine explained to me that I'm an obsessive-compulsive personality (which is not the same thing as someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder). I really didn't know where she got an idea like that until this morning, when I (for once) had some time to get some work done and felt actual physical discomfort doing anything but going back to PAC’s site and seeing if I had, in fact, misread, misinterpreted, or overreacted.

I just spent over an hour there.

I'm standing by my previous posting about them.

You can't take two steps in the sample lessons they offer without tripping over a quote from or reference to the Bible. And that's in the science lessons.

Just as a really, really typical for-instance, here's what PAC has to say about silver:
 
"Joseph, during biblical times, was sold into slavery for twenty pieces of silver. Later, when he became governor of Egypt, Joseph sold grain to people who paid in silver, copper, and gold coins."
 
Now, look. No matter what religion you are, the fact is that there is no archeological evidence for the existence of Joseph, as slave or as governor of Egypt. Yet he's being referred to in a science lesson, in a paragraph that is immediately followed by one about how much silver used to be in American dimes and quarters and when it was eliminated from them.

There are constant references to the Bible and the Christian God in the sample lessons PAC offers. If those samples are not typical of the curricula customers receive on purchase, how could I or anyone else know that PAC is perfectly fine even for someone who's "as atheist as they come"? If these are not representative of their product, why does PAC have them posted?

I also said in my previous posting that people should judge for themselves as to whether or not I was either overreacting or reading out of context. I'm not asking this rhetorically: am I overreacting to these paragraphs from PAC's second lesson in Integrated Physics and Chemistry?
 
"From 600 AD to 1400 AD, Europe fell into the Dark Ages (also called the Middle Ages). Science did not advance during this era of time. The Bible was forbidden in many countries, thus, learning and knowledge came to a standstill in Europe."
 
"The true science of chemistry replaced the false science of alchemy in the 1600s when church reformers began to demand that common people should be able to read the Bible and write about its application to everyday life and science. The study and publication of chemistry developed because church reformers provided the Bible and other books in the common language of the people."
 
Regardless of what one might think of these as accurate portrayals of history -- is this what you expect to find in a supposedly secular science lesson?

I didn't "assume" that PAC would consistently refer to the Catholic church as "The Roman Church." I simply found it to be so. When I asked a Catholic friend of mine if this was something she'd have found offensive, she said yes -- especially in a work purporting to be religiously neutral.

As for their history being "spot on," here's a sentence whose veracity in that respect I'd question:
 
"The next great civilization in the chronology of world history after the Egyptians was the Greeks."
 
One of my friends, on hearing this, wanted to know when and how exactly China had fallen off the face of the "world."

These are all things I didn't mention in my previous posting on PAC. I was too busy "hyperfocusing" on the picture of Hitler and Auschwitz victims in the lesson on Darwin.

I guess, if hyperfocusing means that one is riveted with stupefied fascination, then yes, I did hyperfocus on that page. That’s the kind of thing that tends to get my attention. Call me funny that way.

As I said in my previous posting on the subject, I realize that I don't have to be in love with a product or company to accept an ad. I just have to feel sure of their appropriateness for a secular audience. PAC failed that test.

However, I'm going to go ahead and be glad about rejecting their ad for a reason that has nothing to do with secular appropriateness, though it has everything to do with my own ideas about intellectual rigor.

I am screamingly wild about Robert Ingersoll. I want to marry him or at least have a mad, steamy affair with him, and never mind the fact that he's been dead for over a hundred years. That's how good a writer he is. (And that's how hot I get for smart, smart men.)

Ingersoll was so ahead of his time that even now, his work can startle. He's like Mark Twain, only never sentimental or mawkish and with about twice the kick.

I live in California, where one of the legal homeschooling options is to register as a private school. These schools must have names. Ours is The Ingersoll Academy.

I mention all this because at the end of one of PAC's physics lessons, there was presented for the reader, apropos of absolutely nothing, a "Life Principle," as follows:  
 
"The superior woman stands erect by bending above the fallen. She rises by lifting others."
 
I'm a screaming redheaded feminist, so this isn't the kind of sentiment that just makes me feel happy all over. It makes me feel barfy all over, to be exact.

I know that I'm not a typical feminist, given the fact that I'm a stay-at-home homeschooling mother who does a lot of cooking and cleaning; but I consider myself to be a feminist in a very basic sense: if you're going to hate me, condescend to me, or deny my intelligence, abilities, or essential rights, you'd damned well better be basing your behavior on something other the fact that I'm a woman.

So any quote that seems to say that, by virtue of my gender, my best and only job must be to take care of children and other needy helpless beings is going to bug me. Not because such work isn't worthy, but because I don't like having it dictated to me.

This particular quote bugged me for another reason. The source of it was simply "Anonymous." Did that mean that no one knew who penned this sentiment, or that the writer at PAC just hadn't looked hard enough?

Turns out, it means “c. none of the above.” Which is where my morning got really interesting.

I could find no references to this quote, either in my books or on the Internet. I did, however, find an eye-opening passage in a speech that Robert Ingersoll gave in 1883, in response to the United States Supreme Court's decision that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional.

The whole of the speech can be found on a site called The Secular Web. Here's a link to them:

http://www.infidels.org

and here's a link to the whole speech, in case you feel like taking a gander:

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/civil_rights.html

And here, finally, is the passage that I think deserves to be quoted in full:
 
"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart -- the best brain. Superiority is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others."
 
Ingersoll was a passionate defender of the rights of women. Long before it was fashionable, he urged the right for women to vote, to be able to own their own property even after marriage, to be able to divorce abusive husbands, and to be treated as human beings. It was a point of pride to him that he never treated his wife like "a beggar," as he put it. He was not the keeper of the cash in his house, and his wife didn't have to ask him for money or explain why she needed it. He once graciously gave an interview to a cub female reporter on her very first assignment, and set her at her ease by telling her how glad he was to have a woman reporter to talk to, as he was "sick of men" and would give her an interview that would "make the men ashamed." He was a feminist.

And now, words of his have been twisted into a cutesy-dootsy little maxim that has nothing to do with what he really said and everything to do with the old idea of women being at their best when they're least visible.

Forget it.

I had a root canal yesterday, and I just paid my taxes a few weeks ago; and I still don't need the money that badly.
 
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