Also the Enlightenment and the Establishment Clause:

Quote :

" 9:27 - The board is taking up remaining amendments on the high school world history course. 9:30 - Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with "the writings of") and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson's ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don't buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar's problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards."

Quote :

"11:21 - Board member Barbara Cargill wants to insert a discussion of the right to bear arms in a standard that focuses on First Amendment rights and the expression of various points of view. This is absurd. If they want students to study the right to bear arms, at least try to find an appropriate place in the standards for it. This is yet another example of politicians destroying the coherence of a curriculum document for no reason other than promoting ideological pet causes. Republican board member Bob Craig of Lubbock is suggesting a better place for such a standard. But the amendment passes anyway. The board's far-right faction is simply impervious to logic."

Quote :

"12:28 - Board member Mavis Knight offers the following amendment: "examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others." Knight points out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state. 12:32 - Board member Cynthia Dunbar argues that the Founders didn't intend for separation of church and state in America. And she's off on a long lecture about why the Founders intended to promote religion. She calls this amendment "not historically accurate." 12:35 - Knight's amendment fails on a straight party-line vote, 5-10. Republicans vote no, Democrats vote yes."

http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2010/03/texas_boe_removes_jefferson_fr.php

3/13/2010 8:48:04 AM

You don't happen to have an account of this written by someone who passed 6th grade English Composition, do you? Preferably one also with context of the discussion, information on the current "standards" and the specific changes?

3/13/2010 8:54:44 AM

It was a live blog.

3/13/2010 9:09:37 AM

Schools should just skip all that stuff before Obama got elected.

3/15/2010 12:29:47 AM

^ huh? did you get your education in Texas?

3/15/2010 12:35:22 AM

Wait, the political right is censoring out Thomas Jefferson now? We really are fucked.

3/15/2010 12:41:32 AM

the huge problem with this is because texas is the #2 buyer of textbooks for elementary and high school - so the major textbook producers might go ahead and change textbooks across the board

unless the states tell the producers of the textbooks that they won't buy em.

3/15/2010 2:27:29 PM

texas would probably be pretty cool if they got rid of all the religious crap.

3/15/2010 2:57:22 PM

everywhere would be be pretty cool....

3/15/2010 3:04:40 PM

I firmly believe that if Texas's education system continues down it's current path there will come a time when many major universities will require some form of extra-curricular schooling on Social Sciences before accepting any products of Texas Public Schools.

3/15/2010 5:31:32 PM

Quote :

"It may seem surprising that religious leaders would be praising Jefferson, given that his critics had just months earlier attacked him as an infidel and an atheist. In the 1800 election, John Adams had argued that the francophile Jefferson would destroy America’s Christian heritage just as the French revolutionaries had undermined their own religious legacy. Adams supporters quoted Jefferson’s line that he didn’t care whether someone believed in one god or 20, and they argued that the choice in the election was: “God—and a religious president…[or] Jefferson—and no God.” "

http://www.somareview.com/godwantawall.cfm

3/16/2010 11:03:50 PM

Quote :

""It may seem surprising that religious leaders would be praising Jefferson, given that his critics had just months earlier attacked him as an infidel and an atheist."

This is one of the major things wrong with american politics today. The idiots ranting on about Jefferson being an infidel != all religious leaders. Therefore, no it shouldn't not seem surprising that religious leaders would be praising Jefferson.

3/17/2010 7:50:52 AM

so who is responsible for the Declaration of Independence?

Oh yeah, if you're Texan, you can just throw that out.

ETA for Thomas Jefferson High School in San Antonio to be renamed?

[Edited on March 17, 2010 at 9:01 AM. Reason : fucking bullshit. backwards ass state.]

3/17/2010 8:41:18 AM

There was a piece on Talk of the Nation yesterday about this. Basically Texas wants their history textbooks to focus on a set of conservative values that they can mold history around. If history doesn't support those values, they minimize the impact or totally write it out of the book. They also bend the truth regarding the founding of the US (as a Christian nation), impact of minorities, and reasons wars were fought.

One caller even worked as a textbook editor who had to write for Texas and gave all kinds of insight into the backwoods crap they try to pull to distort what actually happened.

3/17/2010 3:06:02 PM

^^^ if you read the essay, you wouldn’t have felt the need to make that statement.

The editors should do what Google did regarding China, and just stick with reality.

[Edited on March 18, 2010 at 1:40 AM. Reason : ]

3/18/2010 1:39:05 AM

This is why politicians shouldn't be allowed to dictate what gets put in history books

3/18/2010 3:59:12 AM

^^^ Was that the caller who said Texas replaced "democratic ideals/gov't/laws" with "popular sovereignty?"

3/18/2010 8:03:33 AM

The entire state of Texas is nuttier than a squirrel turd.

3/18/2010 12:17:00 PM

If in a free market of ideas, your ideas will lose.. the best option is to own the market.

3/18/2010 12:53:49 PM

i don't see how any of this could possibly pass.

even if texas is the 2nd highest consumer of textbooks, the rest of the country will stop buying them if Jefferson is taken out.

Will Texas also act like Mount Rushmore doesn't exist? Or will they create a new one with Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush Jr on it?

3/19/2010 3:31:35 AM

Doesn't sound like they're removing Jefferson entirely... it's likely that they still include the factual information such as "Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence" and "Jefferson was the Third President of the United States." What they're definitely doing is trying to erase him as a major source of political philosophy for that time period, which is bullshit. And somewhat stupid of them, considering that he favored limited and state-centric government (stuff they would likely agree with) but just happened to be a deist.

I don't have much more input on the subject... my hatred for the state of Texas is well-documented, and this has done nothing to reverse that opinion.

3/19/2010 5:36:22 AM

fucking embed

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-march-17-2010/don-t-mess-with-textbooks

found this rather entertaining. in a sad way.

[Edited on March 19, 2010 at 9:22 AM. Reason : .]

3/19/2010 9:20:00 AM

^per your request:






I thought this was pretty great, the conservatives didn't feel capitalist was PC enough, so they wanted something less offensive

3/19/2010 10:11:15 AM

ha thanks Supplanter i had the code (and I can embed ) i just couldn't get it to work

3/19/2010 10:15:38 AM

Yeah, those daily show ones are always funny. The embed src= usually uses a single ' instead of a double " and there is a bunch of extra stuff in there, so I just cut it down to where the video embed begins and ends, and replace the ' for these "

Speaking of embedding, I saw some CNN coverage of this topic this morning, they haven't thrown the video up yet, but when they do I'll post it here. The whole thing in transcript form would be pretty long, here is a particularly interesting section of the transcript:

Quote :

"ROBERTS: Right now in Texas, they are writing their curriculum, and wherever you live, your student may learn their lesson plan or at least learn from it. That's because Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. Joining me now is Dr. Don McElroy, he's pushed for many of the conservative changes, and Mary Helen Berlanga. She has voted against the changes. Don, let's start with you. Why did you want to undertake the change there is in Texas when it comes to the curriculum? DR. DON MCELROY, VOTED FOR TEXTBOOK CHANGES: Well, our main goal is to restore balance to the curriculum. If you look at the curriculum, a lot of times when it came to us from these review committees that were working on them, they had some liberal bias. They didn't have an accurate presentation of history. So we are trying to restore some balance. ROBERTS: OK, let's take a look before we get to Mary Helen Berlanga at some of the changes that you're proposing here to the curriculum, things like excluding Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions, stressing the role of Christianity American history. Topics of economics, "capitalism," the word replaced by "the free enterprise system." You want to study the unintended consequences of Great Society legislation, Affirmative Action, Title 9. You have rejected a motion to include the names of Hispanics who died at the Alamo, rejected the inclusion of hip-hop in a list of influential and musical and culture movements, though you did keep country music. You want to highlight leading conservative groups from the '80s and '90s but not liberal or minority groups, and highlight things like Republican support of the Civil Rights Act. Mary Helen Berlanga, what are your problems with the changes? MARY HELEN BERLANGA, VOTED AGAINST TEXTBOOK CHANGES: Well, the changes are not balanced. We had educators that came together and experts that came together with recommended -- with a recommended curriculum or standards. We looked at those and then Don McElroy and others began to make substantive changes according to their ideology."

It is unfortunate that the person making the counter-argument to the changes accepted the premise of the argument that balance is the correct way to approach facts about history. She should have pressed harder that it was non-experts putting in whatever the hell they wanted, while ignoring expert recommendations, rather than accepting the premise of a fair and balanced approached.

3/19/2010 10:38:19 AM

^^ The last line is golden.

"and that's how Oscar Romero got disappeared by right wingers, for the second time."

3/19/2010 10:38:50 AM

As much as the Wake County School Board has screwed the pooch lately, this whole Texas thing is making them look not so bad by comparison.

This is from last month, but its more about how much creationism/intelligent-design/evolution is fake and all that to put into textbooks.




This is more recent that the video above. It points out that some of the people making these changes have been voted out of office, but have 10 months left in their term. Looks like they are making use of the time. To do things like put the inaugural address of the confederate states of America along side Lincolns.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

3/19/2010 11:33:27 PM