Ant’s interesting post on American rightard Andrew Schlafly led me to investigate his hOmEsKooLing empire - an educational behemoth where conservative kidz can get, like, good learning without evil liberal bias. There’s stuff on this fiasco all over the web and it’s interesting reading, and the best bits are condensed into this article at RationalWiki. Amongst Schlafly’s brilliance we can include:

• ‘teaching’ hundreds of kids, despite not having any credentials as an educator
• inferring that his courses are accredited, when they are not – and that they would allow students to claim college credit, when they would not
• proclaiming larger classes to be better (liberal teachers want smaller classes to make their sinister mind-control agenda easier to achieve) and claiming to teach the largest US History class in the ENTIRE WORLD, which is teh bollocks
• setting stoopid questions like “What do you find inspiring about Christopher Columbus?” and “Describe what you like most about the Monroe administration” and “Abraham Lincoln was homeschooled. Do you see any characteristics in him that might have reflected [this]…?”
• giving full marks for stoopid answers to his stoopid questions, e.g. to the Monroe question above, “The prosperity” (!?!) and to the Lincoln question, “That he was open to ideas such as growing a beard.” (!?!?1!!)
• putting each kid’s questions, answers, grades and teacher’s comments on the Intertubes for all the Conservapedia world to see
• telling students that sentences are not compulsory in essays
• telling students other clear and meaningful stuff like “You will spend a certain amount of time preparing for the midterm exam. Call that amount of time “x”. How you allocate that time to different areas of 1500-1877 will make a difference on how well you do on the exam. If you spend 90% of x on the period between 1500 and 1700, then you will do poorly on 90% of the questions, because they will be from the period 1700 to 1877. You would have done far better to spend the 90% of x on the time period that will have 90% of the questions”.
• proclaiming that girls are academically weaker than boys (”Think girls can excel in math as well as boys can? Liberals teach they can, which is teaching a falsehood“) and setting different curriculum to accommodate this gender difference
• and, of course, teaching a curriculum jam-packed with a blind, unquestioning allegiance to the conservative mind (if such a thing exists)

Note to Dr (sic) John ‘TingTong’ Ray, get out those diplomas, polish up that CV - there may be another academic gig for you after all.

UPDATE

Current topics up for discussion amongst Eagle Rock University’s study groups include:

1. Judicial Attacks on our Culture

(Bad. See Roe v. Wade)

2. U.S. Sovereignty vs. Globalism

(’Right’ vs. ‘Wrong’) 

3. Immigration and Border Security

(Shoot to kill and drive away the wetbacks)

4. How Candidates are Elected: Elections, Political Parties & Lobbying

(God)

5. Family and Life Issues: Abortion, Cloning, Feminism & ERA

(Sin) 

6. Guns, Gambling & Government

(Problem?)

Anyone who believes Wikipedia has a liberal bias is an idiot. In 2006, one such idiot — lawyer, home-schooling enthusiast and conservative Christian Andrew Schlafly — decided the world needed an alternative to the pernicious, Leftist Wikipedia … a place where other idiots could gather to read about a variety of topics without the terrible inconvenience of truth getting in the way of their backward-arsed ideology.

And so Conservapedia was born.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — demonstrates the rank imbecility of this website more than its entry on Barack Hussein (!!1!) Obama. The whole article is worth reading, just to marvel at how desperate and deranged its authors are — but for your convenience, here are a few highlights:

Obama used his Muslim middle name when sworn in as President,^[7][8] and chose not to use the Bible for his real, private oath. Elected by claiming he’s a Christian, Obama has since avoided attending church on Christmas and Sundays.^[9]

Obama refers to America in the third person, as a foreigner would.

To announce his trip to Berlin in July 2008, Obama used posters which show a marked similarity to posters of Lenin.^[14]

Obama uses the Muslim Pakistani pronunciation for “Pakistan” rather than the common American one.^[36]

Obama has consistently shown himself to be an elitist who looks down on “ordinary” Americans.

Obama’s smears usually fall into two categories: race-baiting and distortions.

Seriously, go and have a look — there’s plenty more gold where the above nuggets came from. And if you have time while you’re there, do yourself a favour and check out the references for the entry’s most outlandish claims (the Lenin poster one is particularly laughable). They make Leon Bertrand QC’s spectacularly inept fumbling for evidence to support his claims seem like the work of a perfectly persuasive genius.

But the last word goes to Wikipedia itself, whose Conservapedia entry lays bare the kind of attitudes that led to its creation:

Conservapedia is an English-language wiki-based web encyclopedia project written from a young Earth creationist, Americentric, right-wing^[2] and Conservative Christian point of view.

[...]

Several articles on the site have had reputations for bias and inaccuracy.^[9][10][11] Conservapedia has also been seen as part of a trend of conservative and Christian-themed Web sites imitating the format of mainstream sites to provide a right-wing antidote or Christian alternative.^[3][12]

Fair dinkum — even if I’d been stupid enough to hitch my wagon to the ideology of the Right all those years ago, I would still be mortally embarrassed by the abortion (pun intended) that is Conservapedia. I wonder how many “conservatives” are.