History Is Bunk

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change

A few highlights:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

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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.”

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There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

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.

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Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

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Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

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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.”)

It’s just mind-boggling. The erasing, demonizing, and/or minimizing of people of color in this far-right version of United States history is par for the course, frankly. Heaven forbid conservative white men don’t get their due credit for ending racism. But now they also want to vanish a white-dude major political figure in United States history because he coined a phrase inconsistent with their political worldview? In what sort of deluded, made-up, historical world can one argue that the primary author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t help inspire the American Revolution?

2009 Social Media Challenge

I’m late catching up with this, but once again Donorschoose.org is holding their annual Blogger Challenge. This year, they’re calling it the 2009 Social Media Challenge. I’m participating once again, under the Black Bloggers for Education Giving Group. I’ve started picking projects to fund and will be adding more over the next few days. If you can spare a few dollars (and yes, I realize times are hard, but this is education we’re talking about), please do. And since this new blog home of mine is new and unheard of for the most part, a nod either this way or to my Giving Page would be a great way to help contribute if you can’t spare the cash.

Once again, my focus will be on literacy and arts education, but you should also check out the science bloggers and Blogher donation pages.

Ah hell, you should check them all out, really.