I wrote all the way back in March of 2009 about the inordinate influence of the Texas School Board on the contents of our textbooks. Well, they are back…
I mentioned before that because they buy so many textbooks, they basically control what 80% of the states buy.
This group of right-wing, Christian Fundamentalist conservatives feel that education is too left-wing and needs balance by injecting some right-wing ideology. Some say they are rewriting history and I agree with them but what can be done to stop them.
Most of the media has sounded the alarm about what is happening but the board in Texas just scoffs at the liberal media’s attempts to keep education progressive and liberal.
What are they trying to change? Well, for one, they want to downgrade Thomas Jefferson as a leading intellectual of our founding period. He was a deist (believe in God but not man-made religion) and the author of the “Separation of church and state” legal theory in our Constitution. They will replace him with Catholic Theologian St. Thomas Aquinas who at the end of his life suffered a stroke when his house of cards of reasoning for the existence of God, collapsed.
The school board wants the children to know that this nation was founded on Christian principles or better yet, was founded as a Christian nation. This is absolutely not true. The founders were mostly deists who scoffed at organized religion because they saw what a problem organized or state religions have been through history up to this point. The French Revolution was in one case, a rebellion against the heavy handed Catholic Church’s grip on French society (off with their heads).
This assault on historical fact, wisdom and truth is hard to fathom in our day and age. I guess one has to be thankful for the existence of the internet which more and more students use to get their information. The internet can also play loose with facts but the truth is there also and hopefully teachers will steer their students to sites that are objective and factual.
I still am pissed that one state’s school board and actually one man, a dentist named Don McElroy who is just a dentist but can instruct history teachers on what they should teach; just unbelievable!
I mentioned before that because they buy so many textbooks, they basically control what 80% of the states buy.
This group of right-wing, Christian Fundamentalist conservatives feel that education is too left-wing and needs balance by injecting some right-wing ideology. Some say they are rewriting history and I agree with them but what can be done to stop them.
Most of the media has sounded the alarm about what is happening but the board in Texas just scoffs at the liberal media’s attempts to keep education progressive and liberal.
What are they trying to change? Well, for one, they want to downgrade Thomas Jefferson as a leading intellectual of our founding period. He was a deist (believe in God but not man-made religion) and the author of the “Separation of church and state” legal theory in our Constitution. They will replace him with Catholic Theologian St. Thomas Aquinas who at the end of his life suffered a stroke when his house of cards of reasoning for the existence of God, collapsed.
The school board wants the children to know that this nation was founded on Christian principles or better yet, was founded as a Christian nation. This is absolutely not true. The founders were mostly deists who scoffed at organized religion because they saw what a problem organized or state religions have been through history up to this point. The French Revolution was in one case, a rebellion against the heavy handed Catholic Church’s grip on French society (off with their heads).
This assault on historical fact, wisdom and truth is hard to fathom in our day and age. I guess one has to be thankful for the existence of the internet which more and more students use to get their information. The internet can also play loose with facts but the truth is there also and hopefully teachers will steer their students to sites that are objective and factual.
I still am pissed that one state’s school board and actually one man, a dentist named Don McElroy who is just a dentist but can instruct history teachers on what they should teach; just unbelievable!
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