Conservapedia:Andy Schlafly on Eagle Forum Live/segment 1
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Segment 1 - Next
Andy and Phyllis rap about Conservapedia, part one.
Transcription: Phyllis in normal text. Andy in bold text. Announcer in italics.
The internet is a wonderful source of information, but how reliable and dependable are all that... eh, all those sources of information you find online. Many, I'm sorry to say are unreliable, but there is a website called Conservapedia, that is well researched and documented. We have the founder of the website, Andy Schlafly, with us today. He's a conservative lawyer, he graduated from Princeton as an engineer, and then he got his law degree from Harvard Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude and is an editor of the Harvard Law Review[1]. Andy teaches one of the largest homeschool classes in the country, on subjects varying from world history to government to economics.
Phyllis you don't even need the script to read those credentials, do ya?
No, That's right.
Andy Schlafly, welcome.
Oh thank you, it's a real pleasure to be on the show again.
From Trenton, New Jersey.
Well, er, what about this new term that's come into our vocabulary, Conservapedia?
I started Conservapedia with my students, about two years ago, as an alternative to Wikipedia, which...
Why do we need an alternative? Doesn't everybody go into Wikipedia?
Well, Wikipedia unfortunately has an anti-Christian, anti-conservative bias to it, and it's not a suitable learning resource for students or adults. Sometimes there are pornographic images in there. There's lots of gossip in there, it's stuffed with trivia, and it's just not a good learning tool, in our opinion. And so we started our own, Conservapedia, and since then we have over 76 million page views and we've been developing entries about American history, world history, current events, and so on. We have over 25 thousand entries of the most important topics that a student would want and that's almost the size of a standard encyclopedia or dictionary, and we welcome the listeners out there to participate in this project. Now I've been using it to teach homeschoolers. My American History class has 66 students, in person, and...
Oh! That's a, that's a pretty good sized class for a homeschooling, I thought homeschooling was just 2 or 3 members of your family.
Well, homeschooling is growing by leaps and bounds, and it's, my American History class may be the largest in the country. But it's been very exciting to use [beep] -dia,[2] to run this class, and what we've been doing is I post the lectures and I post the homework assignments on Conservapedia and the students have been posting their answers to the homework there and then I grade their homework right online, so all the parents and anyone else can watch as the course progresses. And what I've found is that when students write out the material, themselves, they learn it much better compare to when they merely read material when...
Oh! There is no question about that. As a writer, I know that, I, I, I really don't feel comfortable about a subject 'til I've written something about it.
And so the learning has been much enhanced by this, we've covered a full year in just 14 weeks, and it's not because the students are working harder, it's because we're working more efficiently. And by doing it online, the parents can watch what's going on, they can see how their students are doing compared to other students in the class, the students are retaining the material much better, and the feedback is much more effective because the students can submit their homework and then I can grade it within a matter of hours. They don't have to wait a week or two weeks or sometimes in a public school course you don't get feedback on your homework till the end of the course. Well I am giving them feedback almost immediately on what they do and of course they're writing it such that everyone can see it and that has a powerful effect too, its like reciting in front of the class. When you recite in front of the class, in front of other people, you try much harder so it's a real incentive to the students to do better.
Well, there're all kind of surveys now that show really how dumb students are the Intercollegiate Society through studies[3] has conducted a lot of them and students and adults are very ignorant about American history. Are your homeschoolers smarter than that?
Yes they are. They, they really understand American history better than just about anyone now. You can see by the exams I put up. And anyone out there, any listening audience can look at the exams I put up on Conservapedia and test how well you do yourself. And I've got students who achieve nearly perfect scores on these very difficult exams.