To the editor:

The Kansas public schools may have to teach that it is equally possible that the Earth is around 6,000 years old.

I say, “so what.” Part of education is learning what to filter out and furthermore to understand that teachers, professors and textbooks are eminently fallible and often foolish.

My daughter came home recently and said they had spent the entire day in history class learning how horrible Ronald Reagan was (while she knew very well from years at her father’s knee that Jimmy Carter was the worst occupier of the White House in the 20th century). And this fantasy was from one of our favorite Lawrence High School teachers. At least it wasn’t as bad as the last week of her ninth-grade year when they spent the better part of every day watching Michael Moore fiction.

A large part of education is learning when the supposedly learned are way off base, and yet retaining the ability to regurgitate the nonsense on an exam to maintain that GPA. It comes in handy later in life when dealing with many a muddled corporate managers. Many of our high school history texts make it sound like the Pilgrims were just a group on a boat who happened to come to America, for no apparent reason. And the two most important persons in the history of our republic were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Rosa Parks. Now, next to these lessons, we can place a textbook that says the Earth barely predates the Egyptian pyramids.

Is this a great country or what?

John Bush,

Lawrence