The Best Vacation Ever (MathStart 2)

Rating:
Summary: good at showing the concept of charts, but otherwise...
Review: ... I do not recommend this book. It's a good example of a seemingly "neutral" book about math is actually a powerful piece of propaganda. If you look at the storyline critically, it's absurd.

The family consists of a girl, her brother, mom and dad, and grandma. The girl is trying to determine where they should go on vacation, and she uses charts to organize data about the family members' destination preferences. There is no discussion beyond that of the actual decision-making process. It is left for you to assume that the vacation was determined by the vote of a simple majority.

Okay, let's examine that. How do you decide in YOUR family about where to take a vacation? I imagine that the first constraint would be either time or money: how much time you can get off work, when the kids have a vacation from school, and what you can afford to do in that period of time. Murphy presents vacations as an entitlement, claiming "...cats need vacations, too." A cat needs a vacation? Get real.

I am bringing this up because by presenting the taking of vacations as "normal," we must ask how children whose families can little afford the rent, let alone a vacation, would interpret this message. If these white peoples' cat deserves a vacation, yet they do not, does that mean that this society values them as being less than an animal? Some more affluent family's pet?

Sounds about right in a nation that spends billions of dollars every year on pet food while children go hungry, in a country where, in most states, child abuse carries a lighter criminal penalty than maligning a dog.

Furthermore, are we to believe that household decisions involving the allocation of resources are put to a simple vote whereby all family members' wishes are given equal weight? If things operated like that in our household, we would have bubble gum and cotton candy for dinner every night. But if you are able to swallow this idea as a "normal" democracy, than you are more likely to buy into the huge lie that every vote is equally counted when it comes to, let's say, the presidential election in Ohio in 2004. Or Florida in 2000. The majority wins, and that's fair. So we have an almost totally white Congress, and almost totally male Senate... you see how this works. It's "democracy." But we know that's not how it really works. Mom and Dad have all the money, therefore Mom and Dad make the decisions. The children obey.