Sunday I was at a get together at my brother's home with several of our mutual very old friends, their kids, and now their kids.
I was talking to one of the 'kids' and her husband, parents of 4, the oldest a 4th grader.'
They were livid over the math program their kids are going through, nothing new to me for those that have read my posts on this. If anyone wishes to discuss math and the crazy way they're teaching it now, start a thread. Start with 't' and many will pay attention.
Anyhow, with that conversation firmly in mind, I opened an email today from History News Network, and found this:
Vote iQ - Hot Topics - TextBooks - Intro
It's about the TX textbook controversy, my interest of course being social studies. What caught my eye was 'reducing discussion length on civil rights.' I would agree. Now that sounds awful, but to anyone who has picked up elementary or high school texts,
you know that there is little discussion on founders/framers, little on the significance of Mayflower Compact or English Bill of Rights. In most texts there is 0 mentioned about the hardships beyond Jamestown and 0 about the wealth and jump in life expectancies by 1700.
Civil Rights on the other hand is nearly always a full chapter, followed by more discussion on Post WWII America.
So yes, cut some ink from the one, add ink to others.
On the other hand, I found this a bit disturbing, from the 'facts' page:
Require more about conservative leaders and organization, such as Phyllis Schlafly, the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, and Newt Gingrich without inclusion of comparable liberal thinkers or organization.
Anyhow, if anyone else would like to hunt and peck through that site and post some thoughts, I'll probably jump in.
Well Annie, the ultraconservative morons in Texas have decided that there is no need to study one of the 'insignificant' founding fathers...some unknown named Thomas Jefferson.
History Question of the Day
Which of these writers influenced the political philosophy and origins of the founding documents of the United States of America: President Thomas Jefferson, John Calvin, and/or Saint Thomas Aquinas?
Easy, right? The answer is President Thomas Jefferson. You know, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and one of the many founders who threw off the religious tyranny of then-England and safeguarded the separation of church and state in our government.
WRONG! If you are one of the 80% of students in the U.S.A. who will be reading textbooks published in Texas, you wouldn't know that President Thomas Jefferson is a writer who influenced the intellectual origins of our nation. Instead, you will be taught that Protestant "reformer" John Calvin and medieval-minded, pre-rational-thinking Catholic Saint Thomas Aquinas are the true influences upon our nation's founding documents.
John Calvin founded a theocracy, with morality police to enforce his religion's moral code under the threat of punishment, including the death penalty. In one of his most despicable acts, Calvin ordered the death (by slow burning) of his longtime pen-pal and humanist theologian Michael Servetus after assuring Serveus that he'd be safe in Geneva. Why did Calvin kill him? Because Servetus had issues with Calvin's version of church and state. The theocracy of Calvin is what our nation's revolutionaries and founders fought against, so that we could have freedom of choice and speech concerning religion/no religion.
St. Thomas Aquinas stressed the importance of both divine revelation and human reason, but reason was trumped by revelation. The channels for revelation include scripture and the Catholic Church's tradition (not Protestant, not Jewish, not Muslim, not anyone else). Aquinas' pre-scientific-revolution teachings on natural law theory have governed Catholic moral theology and political policy since. How the Catholic Church sees god in nature is how everyone else must also understand god's will for the universe. This medieval teaching has resulted in countless anti-scientific and anti-rational Catholic teachings. If you don't believe an apostate gay like me, then just ask Galileo. The anti-rational and church-imposed teachings upon science and reason are what our nation's revolutionaries and founders fought against, so that we could have freedom of choice and speech concerning religion/no religion.
Earlier this month, the Texas Board of Education voted to rewrite American history in textbooks published in Texas arguing that history has been skewed by the left. The vote passed with ten Republican votes, to five dissenting votes.
The New York Times reports some of the changes the board is making to American history:
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. They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
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. “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”
I guess for Bradley, Article 6 of the Constitution doesn't count, not to mention the First Amendment, and countless other affirmations of the separation between church and state in further Amendments.
They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.” “Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’”
Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel. 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.”)
Also in the changes: Sen. Joe McCarthy's fall from power is redacted in tragic light, saying he was correct about Commie infiltrators and justified in his actions in his witch hunt hearings; the civil rights movement is taught stressing the "unintended consequences" of the movement; and many, many more Christian nips and tucks.
Texas is a huge exporter of textbooks to other states, so don't be surprised when these books end up on your child's desk in Illinois, Washington, or California.
Whole article...
Right wing America...
How many times do kids these days cover the founding fathers? I bet at least in four different grades. And the text books we had were not liberal biased. They pumped us full of propaganda, but it wasnt liberal propaganda. 
