One Good Reason not to Send Your Kid to Public School
Posted on March 12th, 2010 in Uncategorized |
As the Times reports,
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday voted to approve a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the role of Christianity in American history and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
Which matters, of course, because Texas is such a huge market for textbooks, and publishers are generally reluctant to change the textbooks from state to state.
What kinds of changes were made? A couple of reasonable ones—teaching about the growth of the conservative movement in the 1980s seems legit to me—a few silly ones, and some truly offensive ones.
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 the conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)
...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.
Read the entire Times article. These people know nothing about history; they are dangerous idiots.
3 Responses
3/12/2010 6:49 pm
I teach at a charter school. Our English textbooks are from 1997. They refer to AIDS as the scourge of the earth. Literary merit arguments aside, the book is largely made up of white male writers, with those pesky minorities given a brief nod and page count at the end of each unit.
When I read this article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazine/14texbooks-t.html?em
last month, I decided to share it with my classes and let them react to it. We had a lively discussion (anything that takes time away from Walt Whitman is a welcome interruption), and I asked them to take a second look at their books’ bio sections on all of the “main” authors. Their textbooks go into great detail with most of the authors’ love lives (Melville, Poe, Bradford). I asked someone to find the part of the Whitman bio that explained his personal life. There was nothing; same with Thoreau. They suggested that maybe no one liked them. I said that maybe they were gay or bisexual, and that maybe some close-minded textbook publisher thought that being gay was something to be kept hidden. The lightbulbs started going off.
I will be sad to share this news with them. I can’t believe dentists are making judgment calls on the Constitution.
3/12/2010 7:58 pm
The cover page of the g magazine in the Boston Globe today reads ‘Harvard Rules’. I thought it was a reference to your book but, alas, it was just a reference to this article
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/03/12/harvard_could_extend_its_global_reach_to_pacific_islands/
3/19/2010 9:26 pm
read the post. still have the question