Building a separate subculture of ignorant religious fanatics

Louisiana is embarking on a great fundamentalist adventure with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s wide-ranging school voucher program, which diverts state education funds to primarily religious private schools — many of whom will be teaching a curriculum designed by the most extreme and fanatical Protestant religious groups in America: Louisiana Voucher Students Headed to Schools Using A Beka, Bob Jones, and ACE Curricula.

Students will be taught that humans and dinosaurs walked on earth together, and this instruction will be paid for with public funds. Some Louisiana students receiving publicly funded vouchers and attending private schools in 2012-2013 will be taught from educational media promoting young earth creationism, global warming denial, history that is not factual, and bigotry toward Catholicism, Mormonism, other Protestants, and non-Christian religions. This is predictable because some of the schools that are on the approved list to receive voucher students use curriculum from A Beka Books, Bob Jones University Press, and Accelerated Christian Education (ACE). Public funding of the teaching of creationism is already happening in Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states with “private school choice” programs.

This video clip has excerpts from some of these bizarre alternate universe textbooks (the full 35-minute video is here). Notice that the books are even hostile to modern mathematics, singling out “set theory” for some reason. Who knew that every time I used a regular expression in the LGF Blog code, I was walking hand in hand with the forces of Satan?

It’s easy to make fun of this kind of right wing fundamentalist hooey, but it’s more than a little disturbing that an entire subculture of children indoctrinated with such nonsense is being deliberately created right before our eyes, in the year 2012, with help from the Louisiana government.