With all due respect to 'Little Green Footballs', it's take on the story about Texas school board officials trying to moderate and diversify the textbooks used in Texas is all wrong. In it's story "Far Right Texas School Board Members Push Revisionist History" it says that
far right conservatives in charge of the Texas State Board of Education (are making an) outrageous attempt to manipulate curriculum development and textbook production for public schools. The social conservatives appointed by Texas Governor Rick Perry are pushing a revisionist history of the United States in which separation of church and state do not exist, in which the founding fathers intended the US to be a 'Christian nation.'Before I taught US History last year, I read quite a few of the textbooks, and in almost all of them, the textbook taught a very liberal version of US history, emphasizing strict separation of church and state, never mentioned the religion of our Founding Fathers, never mentioned the religious background of our history, and for every religious movement in our nation mentioned 50 progressive movements.
Injecting some 'revisionist history' and 'manipulating the curriculum' would be adding some real diversity to what our students learn. There is even an outside chance that injecting conservative history into our textbooks and revising the curriculum may even help students gain a more accurate view of our history and may very well lead to increased understanding of what made our nation great and what will make it great again.
Let's be more specific and not just fall back rhetoric when we talk about this issue. I read the NY Times article that went into this story in a little more depth. One specific issue that so upsets many is that the Texas School Board wants to include a new standard that textbooks would have to meet that requires students taking classes in U.S. government to identify traditions that informed America’s founding, “including Judeo-Christian” and to “identify the individuals whose principles of law and government institutions informed the American founding documents,” among whom is included Moses. Is this really objectionable? Why is it offensive to ask students to learn these things and for textbooks to discuss them? Other than the fact that they are true and that truth burns like a light through the lies and darkness that liberals wish to spread in schools, what else is wrong with this new standard? Nothing.
Another objectionable standard that these 'right wing fanatics' push on our poor young students is to have students “analyze the importance of the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut and the Virginia House of Burgesses to the growth of representative government.” Oh the horror! Of course, go through your laundry list of liberal cannon law, and I'm sure it is in the guidelines for students to analyze them, but have them learn a little bit about conservative history (our history!) and it's suddenly crazy wild indoctrination!
Little Green Footballs might think that Rick Perry is appointing "religious fanatic cronies who have turned Texas education into a national laughingstock," but I don't think what they are doing is all that 'fanatical' or even something to laugh at. One particular 'fanatical' recurring theme that these 'wacko's' keep pushing is the desire of the board to stress the concept of American exceptionalism in our standards. I guess to liberals it is a laughing matter that America is exceptional. If liberals have their way and push their views in our curriculum, without balancing and sensible conservative views, then soon the sad laugh will be that America will indeed no longer be exceptional.
Let's wait and see what sort of guidelines the Texas School Board comes up with and how textbooks meet them, and then what sorts of students are produced after reading these textbooks. I'm willing to bet that injecting conservative values and religious education in them doesn't harm them as much as liberals and Little Green Footballs thinks it will.
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