From The Guardian:

Boston public schools map switch aims to amend 500 years of distortion

A district will drop the Mercator projection, which physically diminished Africa and South America, for the Peters, which cut the developed world down to size

The Gall-Peters projection, which shows land masses in their correct proportions by area, puts the relative sizes of Africa and North America in perspective.

When Boston public schools introduced a new standard map of the world this week, some young students’ felt their jaws drop. In an instant, their view of the world had changed.

Or they could have looked at the globe in their classroom.

The USA was small. Europe too had suddenly shrunk. Africa and South America appeared narrower but also much larger than usual. …

Mercator’s distortions affect continents as well as nations. For example, South America is made to look about the same size as Europe, when in fact it is almost twice as large, and Greenland looks roughly the size of Africa when it is actually about 14 times smaller.

Alaska looks bigger than Mexico and Germany is in the middle of the picture, not to the north – because Mercator moved the equator.

Three days ago, Boston’s public schools began phasing in the lesser-known Peters projection, which cuts the US, Britain and the rest of Europe down to size. …

“This is the start of a three-year effort to decolonize the curriculum in our public schools,” said Colin Rose, assistant superintendent of opportunity and achievement gaps for Boston public schools.

Yup, that’s his job title. Here’s the press release announcing his hiring:

Colin Rose has been appointed Assistant Superintendent of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps for the Boston Public Schools. In his new role, Rose will attack cultural and structural barriers and promote culturally sustaining practices enabling traditionally marginalized students to engage in rigorous curriculums and pedagogy in Boston’s schools, thus creating opportunity and access they need to close performance gaps.

Back to The Guardian:

The district has 125 schools and 57,000 students, 86% of whom are non-white, with the largest groups being Latino and black. After changing the maps, Rose said, educators plan to look at other subjects and shift away from presenting white history as the dominant perspective….

The respective merits of the Mercator and the Peters maps have long been debated. A spirited discussion about their implications even featured on an episode of the West Wing, in which characters argued for the Peters map to be used in US public schools and told the administration the Mercator projection had “fostered European imperialist attitudes for centuries”, creating an “ethical bias” for “western civilization” against the developing world.

Curriculum chiefs consulted map experts at the Boston public library and were directed to ODT, a company in Amherst, Massachusetts, that is the exclusive North American publisher of Peters projection maps.

Can’t get much more multicultural than Amherst, MA.

It doesn’t seem to occur to anybody involved that the Peters Projection demonstrates how there is plenty of land in Africa for Africans and plenty of land in Latin America for Latinos.

So it doesn’t make much sense for African and Latino migrants to overrun the smaller lands of the North.

Are the woke folk really that dumb that they don’t notice this?

Yes.

By the way, why is Boston still in thrall to Northern Supremacism?

 

 

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