Education knows no boundaries but 'hot button issues,' like their students' love for comic books, highlight school, teacher and parent bias. Japanese comic books (manga) play an important role in the lives of most Taiwanese teenagers. This study includes surveys, a textual analysis of five student-selected manga series and multiple interviews with students and educators about comics' appeal and educational value. Japanese manga contain complex and sometimes contradictory ideologies of ethnicity, gender, class, and violence. From an ethnic perspective, although students may glean cultural content from manga heroes and their retinues, people of color and non-Japanese Asians are either caricatures or non-existent. Taiwanese consumers seem largely unaware of this. Depictions of social and economic class distinctions are subtle although the dominant ideology of manga creators is middle-class. Manga aficionados are, for the most part, oblivious to class distinctions, but some notice that ancient caste precepts flourish. Although most manga focus on violent combat, their youthful consumers seem unaffected by excessive gore. Bloody battles with enemy legions are seen as a necessary element for the hero's journey. From a post-colonialist perspective, manga's exaltation of Japanese cultural archetypes may preempt their readers' allegiance to and pride in being Taiwanese.

The development of science has been an ideological struggle that lasted over three millennia. At and after the times of the Babylonian Empire, however, the pace of scientific evolution was painfully slow. This situation changed after Copernicus kick-started the Scientific Revolution with his heliocentric theory. Newton's law of universal gravitation transformed natural philosophy, previously focused on mythology and abstract philosophical thinking, into an orderly and rational physical science. Einstein's redefinition of space and time revealed a new and central principle of the Universe, paving the way for the huge amounts of energy held deep inside physical matter to be released. To this day, many of the our known physical theories represent an accumulation of changing knowledge over the long course of scientific history. But what kind of changes did the scientists see? What questions did they address? What methods did they use? What difficulties did they encounter? And what kind of persecution might they have faced on the road to discovering these beautiful, sometimes almost mystical, ideas? This book's purpose is to investigate these questions. It leads the reader through the stories behind major scientific advancements and their theories, as well as explaining associated examples and hypotheses. Over the course of the journey, readers will come to understand the way scientists explore nature and how scientific theories are applied to natural phenomena and every-day technology.