Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

[Teuthida]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. [as in dentist] Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”


They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/03/13/us/13texas_graphic/13texas_graphic-popup.jpg

I wouldn't care so much what Texas does except:

As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/03/12/texas-education-board-cuts-thomas-jefferson-out-of-its-textbooks/

[TheGame]

I heard about this yesterday. This is pretty disturbing.

[BlueFire]

http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ffffuuuuu.jpg

[Professor S]

While I agree with the spirit of having more balance in our public schools, I think this potentially goes too far. I think covering that more about Nixon's role with opening China needs to be explored and Reagan administration's contributions, but looking at what has been reported in the post above, this seems more like advocation/indoctrination than education. I don't like it when teachers indictrinate regarding global warming or distribution of wealth, and I don't like it if they do it for free enterprise either. People should be free to choose their own course based on facts, not opinion.

If done in terms of expressing facts, I think there is value in describing poltiical changes over time, such as the conservative resurgence (it did exist and is part of history), as long as it is taught in the correct context. I think this should be covered just as the The Great Society and the peace movement of the late 60's early 70's should be covered.

To be fair, I'd like to see these "conservative" items in the curriculum shown in comparison to the rest of the curriculum. Right now we're only seeing the changes/additions, not the full picture.

Renaming Capitalism? Really? Capitalism is not a dirty word, its the real name of a system of economics, and so far the only system thats ever worked. And I also don't agree with the Christian history portion, even though it COULD be done appropriately, I doubt it will. It will either be taught as truth or as fiction depending on the instructor's bias.

EDIT: Just to clarify I think positives and negatives should be explored for all governments and social movements (as long as they take place in the appropriate class). To give an example, when I was taught about the New Deal, all we learned was basically how wonderful it was, but there ius a whole school of very legitimate history that has sizeable criticisms of it. I was never exposed to that side until much later on.

[TheSlyMoogle]

Haha public school is a joke.

I had one good history teacher throughout high school, and the funniest part is he was the high school basketball teacher/ a huge jock, but that man loved history.

Sadly he only taught world civ.

Now to put into perspective the rest of my historical learning:

My freshman year:

Had the choice to take either US Government or Geography. I chose US Gov. because I was much more interested in Law and government than labeling maps, which is something I felt I could learn on my own.

Huge mistake. Our teacher was perhaps the biggest failure ever. She was in her mid-30s, probably obsessing over men because she wanted a baby. After the first 3 weeks of class all we had done was copy definitions every day in class from a list of words on the board and then finding them on our own in the text. One day at the end of the class I was like "Uhm are we ever going to actually have class?" in a roundabout way she was like "Oh this is class, government is just definitions" I rolled my eyes and was like "It's also history etc." then she was all "Well the other students aren't as smart as you" and I was all "That's bullshit, you ignorant bitch"

I walked out and was assigned to go to the library every day after that, where I read books. I still got an A for the class.

My sophomore year was world civ, like I said, Mr. Perry was awesome. He consistently had the best passing rate of the teachers in our school too. He loved history, and would even liven things up by talking about stuff like the rumors that Catherine the Great had a horse fetish. I mean just daily he kept things interesting. I only fell asleep in his class 1 time, and it was the day we were learning to label the US map for some reason, as if I hadn't done that 10,000 times, and it also happened to be 9/11. We left in the middle of the class to go watch the coverage in the library. We also spent the next 5 days talking about 9/11 and the implications it would have on history. Perry = Awesome teacher.

Junior year, my AP US History teacher was a joke. He was the sports coordinator and he spent 95% of his time literally outside of the classroom and the other 5% he was showing videos. I don't even remember taking a test in his class. It got to the point where every day we would play hacky sack and eventually when that got boring we started just not going to the class and heading to the gym to play Basketball because coach gullet didn't give a fuck. It is quite fortunate that I loved history already.

My Senior year was AP US Gov. taught by the same bitch who taught my first US gov class. No one signed up that year, or it wasn't taught. HA! Actually, kinda pathetic because that's an AP test I could have passed other than the 2 english courses.

I feel it is extremely pathetic the way we cultivate young minds in this country sometimes. This is not to say all my teachers were terrible. Overall after my Freshman year in math the quality of my teachers was great, as well as the one spanish teacher we had, she was awesome. My English Teachers were fantastic for Rural KY, especially my Freshman Honors, and AP Senior English teacher. My science teachers were consistently good throughout high school, including a super hardcore Honors Biology teacher, and an awesome AP Bio teacher.

However some of the extremely idiotic classes I had to take as part of the KY state curriculum were just... Like the 4 week 4 class rush that was just silly. Basically Personal Finance, Home Ec, Agriculture and I don't even remember what the 4th part was because the teacher didn't give a damn about teaching it. It was pointless.

We all had to take a computer class (AKA typing) and there was no option to test out of it. I could have used that time to take some other class as I had typing in middle school and hello, computer all my life. I generally finished the assignments in around 10 minutes and then was internet for the rest of the class.

Anyway this just generally reminded me of how mostly pathetic my education was, and how much I self-taught without realizing it through either my own readings or through college stuff.

[Vampyr]

Man, Mr. Perry was a great history teacher - one of the few classes in high school I actually enjoyed.

Old Mr. Trusty in middle school was also a really good teacher.

I think everything I know about history right now I either learned in elementary school, where I had a really good teacher who went over the American Revolution and everything, then Mr. Trusty taught ancient civilization history - the Babylonians, Greeks, Egyptions, etc, then Mr. Trusty who taught modern world civilization.

So I know basically nothing about WW1, the Gulf War, the Cold War, or anything else not related to those areas.

I would also like to add that reality has a well known liberal bias.

[manasecret]

How long has the idea of separation of church of state in the U.S. been a controversial issue? Are they willfully ignoring all of American history to push a political point of their own? Are any of these people even historians?

[Professor S]

I would also like to add that reality has a well known liberal bias.

The funniest part of that statement is that liberals completely miss the irony when they say it. Its a political IQ test in one sentence.

[Vampyr]

The funniest part of that statement is that liberals completely miss the irony when they say it. Its a political IQ test in one sentence.

What's the irony, exactly?

Whenever I use the statement, I'm referring to the fact that throughout history, conservative ideas have always been the ones to fall to the wayside.

[Professor S]

What's the irony, exactly?

I hate that I have to explain this. When a liberal makes a statement that reality has a liberal bias, don't you think that liberal might be biased? :mischief:

Whenever I use the statement, I'm referring to the fact that throughout history, conservative ideas have always been the ones to fall to the wayside.

If "history" is 100 years, then I'd tend to agree with you to a point, and that only depends if you refer to modern liberalism or classical liberalism. If the government promises people something for nothing, I would tend to think people would support such an ideology. JFK was a classical liberal and he believed in individualism and cut taxes. Modern liberals I would call "leftists".

But I would also point out that fascism and communism also fell to the wayside in brutal fashion, both leftist ideals/end points.

If you can say anything about reality is biased, its a centrist bias, as we have continually fluctuated between left and right concepts once going to far to either side becomes uncomfortable/intolerable; a constant search for that mythical happy medium. Most people don't like either leftist or conservative ideology in total, and I think that's a good thing. Centrism is probably the only thing that prevents out Republic from turning into a totalitarian state.