You may have seen on the news that the state of Texas is proposing a change in social studies textbooks. Lawmakers want the textbooks to be more politically correct, but Texas school board officials are more concerned with injecting their own Christian ideals. In a public school system, textbooks should be politically correct.
These new text books will reflect the views of Christian conservatives who are trying to impose their personal biases. Not only evolution in science books will be affected, but these people want to re-write history with a more conservative twist.
According to Don McLeroy, a Texas school board member who helps write the public school curriculum, liberals have filled textbooks with biases and Texas is simply evening the score.
“To me it is just providing accurate history, and my observation is the left doesn’t even know they have biased it. They just think that is what it is,” McLeroy said.
In an interview, he also implied that minority groups, blacks and women, gaining the right to vote happened because white men made it happen for them.
Basically, some Texan fundamentalist Christians are controlling what goes into textbooks throughout the country.
According to a “Nightline” piece about this, most textbook publishing companies make their products to suit their buyers, and because Texas is such a large state, it purchases more books than any other state. Whatever passes in Texas will be what public school children will be subjected to throughout America.
Things we know as scientific evidence will be pushed to the side, Creationism will be taught in school, and the acts of Joseph McCarthy will be justified in your future children’s textbooks.
If you paid attention in history class (real history class where they teach what actually happened), you know he was the precious Republican senator from Wisconsin who accused more than 200 fellow politicians, actors and regular citizens of being communists.
Somehow, this is okay to the Texas Board of Education, and it should be written in textbooks as a reasonable act. In my opinion, justifying McCarthyism is as bad as justifying Communism.
And it only gets better from there. They also require that the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, be mentioned alongside Abraham Lincoln, the actual U.S. president at the time of the Civil War.
He says they’re just trying to reflect what has actually happened in U.S. history. Because there are enough witnesses left from the ’60s who accurately remember the events of that decade, they can’t make anything up about the ’60s until at least 2030. Oh wait. They tried removing Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court judge, and any mention of Ceaser Chavez, the famous labor organizer.
Milestones in American history would be discounted. And what is that they always say about history? If you don’t learn about your history, it will repeat itself?
They did successfully remove the author of “Brown Bear, Brown Bear what do you see?” because his name is Bill Martin Jr. which also happens to be the name of another author who wrote a book critical of capitalism. They got them confused apparently. Nice example of how intelligent these people are.
If you have a biblical world view, that’s great. But I can have morals and teach my future children morals at home. I will probably take my kids to church when I have them in the distant future, but school and church should not be related. Not only is it wrong to create a bias, half of the things Texas Board members want to include are simply not true. Being exposed to religious teachings of any kind should be up to the parent, not the school board.
You can teach your kids whatever inaccurate garbage you want to in your own home. However, I’d like to know that when I have kids and send them to school in the distant future, they’re learning true facts.
Elementary school should not be linked to Sunday school in America. Whatever happened to separation of church and state? Young minds are being molded by people who base their lives on making laws pass based on ignorance.
The whole issue should be embarrassing to conservatives. It makes them appear brainless as a whole, which occasionally isn’t the case.
Thankfully McLeroy has been voted out of office. Unfortunately, he has his seat on the board for the rest of this year, and by the time he finally leaves office, the social studies rules will already be in place and will be here stay for the next ten years in every U.S. public school.
I encourage you to watch the “Nightline” special on this topic on YouTube.
