- Share This Post
- 4
- submit
- 8
-
Sparkle (0)
The people who keep asking "Is Black History Month still necessary?" may have to concede, thanks to Texas, that months acknowledging the contributions of specific groups may be more necessary than ever now and in the future. In fact, thanks to Texas, we may have to start something called "Honest History Month," 30 days of untwisted education. Yes, this post is about the Texas State Board of Education opting for social studies and history books that stress a conservative world view and how that move will affect your child's education and possibly America's political future.
If you've missed the story, here's a lead from the New York Times:
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.
That part about the Texas program "questioning the Founding Fathers' commitment to a purely secular government" should disturb you, because it's referring to a belief that there's no such thing as "separation of church and state." Texas made changes, such as removing Thomas Jefferson and replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, Sir. William Blackstone and John Calvin. You see, Jefferson is associated with The Age of Enlightenment and "coining the phrase 'separation of church and state,'" per the NYT and other sources.
There's a teaching among Christians, Dominion Theology, that says America is a Christian nation, and therefore its laws may impose Christian moral standards on citizens. Say good-bye, civil rights. Christian moral standards have been used in the past to promote segregation -- saying that black people are cursed by God and deserve to be treated as such (justification for the slave trade), that the head of woman is man (justification for patriarchy) and that only one sexual orientation is acceptable in society (just say "no" to gay marriage). So, condition a generation of children to think that there's no such thing as the separation of church and state and see where that road takes you.
I tossed Black History Month into this discussion because studying why we have BHM and how it came to be offers a lesson in how distorting history can swing opinion about certain groups and influence political decisions. Like so many issues in America, race is a factor in this Texas story, as well. More from NYT:
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.”
The conservative Republican proponents of the this new curriculum also tried to remove Thurgood Marshall from its new history book but failed to do so. However, they did manage to give the Black Panther Party nearly equal billing with Martin Luther King, Jr., so children will understand how afraid white people were during the civil rights movement. They want students to see that the movement was not as peaceful as the Martin Luther King, Jr., story makes it appear. Also, so Republicans will stop getting a raw deal on race, space is given to Republicans who supported desegregation.
Right now, we're celebrating Women's History Month, another spotlight on a marginalized group. The Texas curriculum also instructs students about women and equality, giving Phyllis Schafly her space. If you downplay feminism and promote the likes of a Phyllis Schafly more to fill the void, what are you really doing?
They've also attempted to strip the social studies curriculum of the word "capitalism" to define America's economic system and replace it with "free enterprise system" because "capitalism" today has a negative connotation, they say. Furthermore, whenever possible they've replaced "democracy" with "republic." While a great case can be made that America's form of government is technically republican and not democratic, the reasons for the change have far more to do with molding the minds of children toward a specific political paradigm rather than any genuine
