I hadn’t seen this before, but California’s hilariously moronic legislature apparently decided to ban all textbooks over the length of 200 pages a couple of weeks ago. Yes, that’s right: all textbooks used in public schools will have to be under 200 pages if Gov. Schwarzenegger signs the bill into law. From the SacBee article (free registration required):

AB 756 would force publishers to condense key ideas, basic problems and basic knowledge into 200 pages, then to provide a rich appendix with Web sites where students can go for more information.
[…]
Goldberg said the thrust of her bill is learning, not economics.

“We’re talking about a dynamic education system that brings young people into being a part of the learning process,” she said.

What this really means is that textbook publishers will now release multi-volume sets and thus be able to charge more. Hooray for government intervention! Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that the Governator uses some common sense and kills this idea before it starts spreading to other states. Idiocy is contagious amongst western state legislatures.

Meanwhile, on the east coast, the Vermont government has decided to disallow “religious viewpoints” on vanity plates. That’s right, apparantly the plate “JN36TN” is too subversively Christian for the state’s assistant attorney general. I’m all for the separation of church and state, but this is crazy.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2005 at 18:02 by Ian and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.