The state of Texas has decided to rearrange history to indoctrinate students with GOP propaganda.
Today, the right-wing Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) will give final approval of content for state social studies curriculum. The standards will “dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade.” Yesterday, this unqualified board — which includes a woman who thinks public education is a “tool of perversion” and a chairman whose real profession is a dentist — continued to inject their right-wing ideology into the state’s standards, pushing for inclusion of more conservatives, more Confederate glorification, and more distortion of progressive viewpoints.
Whether To Require Students To Learn Obama’s Middle Name: Republican David Bradley is one of the leaders of the SBOE’s far-right faction. Yesterday, he suggested that if students were going to learn about Barack Obama as the first African-American president, they should also learn his middle name — Hussein. However, fellow Republican Bob Craig objected, saying, “The intent of what you’re doing is pretty obvious, but I don’t think it is necessarily correct,” pointing out that other presidents like Kennedy and Reagan don’t have their middle names in the standards. Bradley eventually withdrew his amendment, and the board decided to list Obama as he is on the White House website: Barack H. Obama.
Elevating Confederate Leader Jefferson Davis To The Level Of Abraham Lincoln: There was “prolonged debate” yesterday over whether to “include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address with a lesson on Abraham Lincoln’s philosophical views.” Far-right Republican Cynthia Dunbar said that excluding Jefferson would be an attempt to “whitewash” history. (TFN Insider adds, “But that’s what Davis’s address does! The address doesn’t even mention the reason southern states seceded: slavery.”) Eventually, the SBOE votes to keep in Davis and require students to “contrast” his speech to Lincoln’s speeches.
Requiring That Historical Figures — Except Conservative Ones — Must Be Dead For Students To Study Them: Yesterday, SBOE voted to strip United Farm Workers of America co-founder Dolores Huerta from a third-grade list of “historical and contemporary figures who have exemplified good citizenship.” Several officials argued that she is a socialist and therefore should be excluded. But perhaps the most blatantly biased objection came from Bradley, who said:
I am very reluctant to include persons who are still alive. By definition of “history,” you must be dead, because you never know when you might embarrass us later.
…
Of course, the board has had no problem including Wallace Jefferson, the Republican chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, or right-wing figure Phyllis Schlafly… [emphasis original]
Inserted from <Think Progress>
For all intents and purposes, they are transforming Texas classrooms, and those in whatever other states follow the Texas standard to save money, into indoctrination centers teaching children what to think, not how to think.
Of course Texas can count on the GOP Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, for support.
It’s apparent that Fox News is fully on board with the conservative effort to change the Texas curriculum in order to mold it to their Christian right revisionist view of history. Yesterday, despite having originally booked somebody from the “other” side (“People From The American Way”) Martha MacCallum hosted only a far right, Texas conservative Christian supporter of the conservative changes whose views went unrebutted by MacCallum who agreed with her. Turns out that People for the American Way were, according to their commentary, told that the segment had been scratched. (Guess Fox had its fingers crossed when they said that!)… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <News Hounds>
Can you believe that Faux was so afraid of presenting a fair and balanced perspective that they lied to PFAW?!!?
Isn’t it bad enough that these Texas kids are exposed to GOP propaganda on Faux Noise, without getting it in school too?
22 Responses to “Texas Passes Textbook Propaganda”
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It is about time the moral refuted the immoral – Go Texas…
Roger how is it moral to teach intolerance and bigotry? Is it moral to give a bogus email address to post an opinion on a blog? Is hypocrisy moral?
Yes, and who better to teach morality than ignorant, hypocritical, anti-science, history revisionist, right wing evangelicals right?
Welcome, Michael. I wonder if Larry Craig will offer a course in Wide Stancing 101.
I suppose you’re against our young patriots learning about the free market benefits of the Atlantic triangle trade system, a system I might add, that has made all modern societies rich and plentiful?
You suppose correctly, is using that term serves to hide that 1/3 of that triangle was slave trade.
No we are against whitewashing the slave trade and calling it the “Atlantic triangle trade system”. The fact that you are defending it is even more morally disgusting. Totally expected however, from a Repug.
Michael, Randal is not a Repug. He’s a long time friend with a ton of snarkiness.
BANNING TONI MORRISON’S BOOK FROM FRANKLIN CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL?
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20104290404
http://www.indystar.com/article/20100504/OPINION01/5040314/1002/OPINION/Advanced-Placement-students-can-handle-mature-material
Welcome, JMB. While Morrison’s book is a separate issue it still comes down to censorship. Many of the books I studied in High School would be considered offensive by the extreme right today.
I went back to college for a few years (quite a few years–LOL) and one of the groups I joined set out to look up books that had been banned from or at least challenged in classrooms to read and discuss! Boy was that fun!!
And I think some of the stuff we did read when I was in school would probably actually annoy the left side! Chapters from the Bible were quoted in my Reading Text!!
Diane, I won’t ask your age, but anything banned before I graduated high school whoud have been racy indeed.
I would have no problem with Bible chapters as reading text, as long as the study was literary, not religious. Our language is rich with Biblical metaphor.
Tom, what is happening to your country? The US seems to be speeding backwards at the speed of light. Where did the decades of enlightenment and intelligence go? This just seems to be a symptom of a much deeper disease that has taken hold of the US. It makes me sad.
Josie, they disappeared in a flood of right-wing propaganda. The people behind this are the same ones behind the “show me your papers” law in Arizona. I’m seeing a similar trend in Canada under Harper, but to a far lesser degree.
Jo, the far right is trying to speed us back generations and include falsehoods into the curriculum of school children. Those poor kids in Texas – no wonder they have one of the lowest high school graduation rates in the country – who could stand to listen to that tripe? And where are the teachers protesting this?
Another reason for their low graduation rate is that Texas pushes poor achievers out of the school system to improve their average test scores, starting under the Texas program that became NCLB.
On the upside, Texans may get so dumb that Mexico can retake the land? Or, at least the next generation of Texans will be perfect fodder for the Chinese toy factories when they take over the US of A. ? I haer that polls suggest that folks there don’t cotton to school boards making these decisions but want experts to do so. We shall see.
Perhaps we should just build the fence on the northern border of Texas. 😉
jmb27 makes an interesting point (he left the same comment at my blog). Along with their “history” where Jesus rode in on his Brontosaur and saved America from the injuns and communists, they’ll probably ban more books than we ever imagined.
I like Sherry’s point too, that future Texans will be so gullible, they’ll fall for anything. Scam artists who can’t find enough victims to fall for their scams will go to Texas for some easy pickings.
Tom, they have been trying for decades. I remember then teyong to ban books in the sixties and seventies.
They must already be at maximum gullibility. Otherwise they would not elect so many Republicans. Now they’re after the Guiness record for stupidity.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaacccccccccccccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!!!!!!
OK out of my system!
Screaming is cathartic when you’re in pain!
Sometimes I wonder if fighting the civil war to keep the nation together was actually a good thing! Fight to end slavery YES, keep the red-neck rubes–NOT!!
It pains me to think that Lincoln actually did unconstitutional things to keep the southern states in the Union.
And Texas has always had a superiority complex–since Texas was once a sovereign country. If we are able to get rid of our petroleum habit, we could let them fend for themselves again. They only cried for help when they couldn’t defeat Mexico. But our past frustrated royalty wanted as much land as possible in our country so they agreed to help out in exchange for absorbing them.
Of course, I would be in favor of a very lax refugee law for the poor liberals and free thinkers who would want do escape to safety before they got caught inside the fence that would be built around the perimeter to keep the “illegals” out.
And not only do I feel sorry for the poor kids in Texas, this decision will ripple across the country as publishers push the Texas version of textbooks off on other districts so they won’t have to publish multiple versions of the same subject matter. Many school districts just go with the pubs recommendation because it is usually cheapest and the bottom line is an all encompassing concern for the people who are educating the future of our country and taking care of our greatest assets–our children because we cannot seem to have the wherewithal to spend the money on them that they deserve as our greatest assets.
Whew–I think I typed that all in one breath! Toastmasters would sure not be happy with me.
Toastmasters? I’m a CTM and used to facilitate Speechcraft. I have only one question about building the fence around the Texas border. Should we include Oklahoma too? 😉