“Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change” by James McKinley, Jr.; The New York Times; 3/12/2010.
Comment: Because of its size, Texas wields a disproportionately large influence over school curricula. The Texas Board of Education’s decision to delete textbook references to Thomas Jefferson in favor of mention of Thomas Aquinas and Jean Calvin will affect far more than the unfortunate pupils of “Baja Oklahoma!”
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. The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.
The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. . . .
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.”)
“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
Having just completed a fairly detailed and thoroughly researched historical study entitled “The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson,” I am struck by several glaring areas for which I cannot help but shudder in fear for the days ahead. First, Jefferson’s philosophy and writings (and the Jeffersonians themselves) are actually saturated with the omnipresent importance of God. Organized religion however, was to Jefferson, like a King or a Corporation– i.e a vehicle for the tyranny of mankind.
Speaking of tyrannies over mankind, I am disturbed by how ignorant so many Americans are about America. The time to recognize the death of the American Republic and it’s “dream” is omnipresent. I’d bet my home that not 1 of those 10 in favor read Jefferson’s voluminous materials.
So...this is America. We will reduce ourselves to ignorant serfs while waving around Heritage Foundation copies of the “Declaration of Independence,” watch tea parties abound who couldn’t tell you what the Boston Tea party was protesting, meanwhile making Anti-Obama/I heart Glenn Beck signs and championing corporate deregulation...and what better agitprop to distract the children from the biggest corporate crime in history against the U.S. (and the world) by changing the Sex Education curriculum to focus on teaching students the proper way to perform fellatio on the Capitalist phallus...
...how long before our calendars have an official day of the apocalypse marked(with whatever comes after blank as their brains...)
Huh, so it turns out college is a communist conspiracy:
I think Ricky might be try to get some of that sweet sweet Thiel scratch (ok, probably not, but who knows).
The Texas Board of Education’s textbook curriculum committee had better watch out. It has competition. Ok, it’s not really competition. It’s more like help, although there might be some competition over who can please the Kochs the most:
Larry Krieger, the North Carolina-based “leading critic” of AP U.S. History courses, might be waging this fight in North Carolina at the moment, bu t keep in mind that Krieger’s influence isn’t limited to North Carolina. He’s got powerful allies. Like the RNC:
It’s not hard to see why far right groups like the Concerned Women for America (Phylis Schlafy’s group), the American Principles Project, and the RNC would be backing this Krieger guy. But when you read things like...
...it’s pretty clear that the Kochs and the rest of their far right fellow travelers have found their man for destroying US history classes! Heck, he even agrees with the idea that “government should preserve wilderness areas [from] exploitation of western landscapes” and yet opposes curriculum that teaches about figures like John Muir who promoted the idea because that would be indoctrination. Yes, the Kochs have their man.
So get ready to hear more warnings from Larry Krieger about the dangers of teaching high school kids about history of the Progressive movement and dangerous ideas like ‘Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.’
While this is all incredibly depressing, keep in mind that the RNC and the Koch brothers aren’t simply doing their best to destroy high school history curriculum. They’re also get awfully close to teaching these kids one of the most valuable lessons they could possibly learn by the time they graduate high school: The oligarchs running this country want to brainwash your kids into being a clueless proles.
Seriously, just imagine being in high school and finding out (on the internet or somewhere) that two of the richest guys in the nation just trashed your education for their personal and corporate advantage. How is the rebellious teenage mind going to process that fun fact?
Sure, there’s always been attempts by the powerful to manipulate education, but it’s not normally this obvious and easy to catch. In other words, kids across North Carolina are about to very direct lesson that the manipulation of society by powerful forces isn’t just something for the history books, it’s happening to everyone today and the kids are one of the primary targets. What an invaluable life lesson for all those kids!
Granted, it would be a lot better if students were allowed to learn from textbooks that weren’t tailor made for the perpetuation of a suicidal oligarchy, but some of the most important lessons in life can’t be learned from a textbook. So....thanks for being so open about your power mongering Koch brothers!
In related news...
Here’s a closer look at North Carolina’s new Koch-rriculum for kids:
So the Kochs and ALEC want to indoctrinate school children into a worldview that sees the original structure of the US government as almost perfect, where slavery was merely “an important economic and social institution” that didn’t reflect any sort of endemic racism. And once you accept all that, the history of civil disobedience and the civil rights movement is kind of moot, so why bother teaching it, right? And how can we get back to that state of near perfection? By curtailing federal regulations on interstate commerce, of course. Also, don’t forget be judgmental of people that aren’t harming anyone, kids! It’s a virtue!
Wow. Still, it’s a little surprising there wasn’t anything about overturning the 17th amendment. It’s probably tucked away in there somewhere.
Knowlege isn’t power. Know you know, FWIW:
Well, at least we probably shouldn’t have to worry about hearing that same stale argument about how we would be living in a sea of shared prosperity if only people would properly educate themselves. The GOP stopped pretending to even care about improving access toa quality education years ago (ok, they still sort of pretend). Now it’s all about the false tax-cut induced austerity, which means we hear less from politicians pretending to care about education and more about pretending that we have no choice but to cut hearts and minds of the next generation:
Yes, while it’s clear that a “skills gap” is not the cause of stagnating wages and rising inequality, as so many “serious people” would have you believe, that still doesn’t mean we don’t need an educated populace in order to have a functional society...quite the opposite. But it does mean that having an education that gives you useful skills in no way ensures that you’ll be compensated enough for putting those skills to work to even achieve a middle-class lifestyle these days, let along rising wages. Decades of stagnant incomes and an economy increasingly concentrated in the hands of the oligarchs does that to the value of the education.
So let’s hope there’s a big push to expand educational opportunities because the US society actually values having an educated citizenry and not as some sort of magical inequality panacea Let’s also hope any efforts to increase access to education take a “pay it forward” approach to financing instead of the “pay it back (wiht interest)” model that dominates the college experience today. Just because the right-wing has undermined the notion that expanding educational access with lead to both a closing “skills gap” AND a closing inequality gap AND drive the economy doesn’t mean there aren’t ways we could achieve all of those goals simultaneously.
Although, keep in mind that,even if we pulled all that off and provided free universal education for all, finding a new social contract that works for everyone in an era when education has less and less value is still going to be necessary.
If you thought the GOP’s war on school lunches for poor kids was unappetizing, Indiana Supreme Court just gave the green light to a whole new strategy for ensuring children from homes with the greatest financial resources learn even more poverty-related life lessons: Pay-for-service privatized school buses:
OK, so...:
So, assuming that state law changes that barred the pay-for-service buses (seems likely at this point), it sounds like privatized school buses are coming to the state of Indiana! At least to the poorer counties without a substantial property-tax base. Maybe they could get some of the high-school seniors to drive the buses. That might find some support in the legislature (it’s worth a try!).
Barring that, hopefully at least some of the kids will be able to take public transportation as a cheaper alternative to the pay-for-service privatized service. Hopefully.
The College Board just revised the standards for the US advanced placement history exam. Why the revisions? Because Republican National Committee and groups of right-wing activists demanded it. It turns out the characterization of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric as, at times, “bellicose” was somehow inaccurate:
America’s young minds are once again safe to learn about American exceptionalism without any “revisionist” bellicose rhetoric about how Saint Ronnie used bellicose rhetoric. Phew!
So are the conservative activists satisfied? The Kochs are presumably pleased. And Larry Krieger, one of the leading activists in this fight, sure sounds pleased. And why shouldn’t he be pleased? According to Krieger, the College Board asked Krieger to review the changes:
It sounds like everyone is quite please with all the changes. At least, everyone is pleased who was freaked out by all the “progressive indoctrination” of the earlier version of the curriculum is pleased.
Yay. Now America’s children are free to not learn about things like the history of corporate opposition to any sort of environmental protections and get a nice fair and balanced education instead. And the rest of us got to learn fun facts like how the Republicans don’t want their icons to be associated with “bellicose rhetoric”. Who knew?
Guess what South Dakota just removed from its high school history curriculum: early American history, where “early” appears to include anything that happened during the Civil War or earlier:
“What we’re going to get is students who don’t differentiate, say, Abraham Lincoln’s time period from George Washington’s time period from the Puritans. And it will get lumped together and we’ll wonder why”
In other words, in South Dakota, the following situation might actually get substantially worse:
“Before the test, 89 percent of respondents expressed confidence they could pass it; 83 percent went on to fail.”
That was testing on adults, and now South Dakota is going to let us find out how much worse Americans’ knowledge of their own history can get. It’s kind of exciting. But don’t just thank South Dakota for turning its kids into civic ignorance guinea pigs. There are other state-wide experiments in mass miseducation underway, like, of course, Texas:
“Most of the textbooks found to be problematic were nevertheless approved”
What a fun trend in American education. And when there actually is a correction, it might not actually get corrected in print for another decade:
It all raises the question of which kids are getting a better education: the Texas kids that learn about how “workers” from Africa “immigrated” to the United States as part of the slave trade, or the South Dakotan kid that doesn’t doesn’t even get that level of exposure to historical ‘facts’. It’s a tough call. Mass ignorance of history and current event is a danger to society, there’s no doubt about that. But it could be worse...
So is this some sort of ‘Trump effect’? The culmination of years of demonization by the GOP? Some sort of stupidity synergy? Who knows, but according to a new poll, support for higher education by Republican voters has plummeted over the past couple years and now only 1 in 3 Republicans think colleges are a positive force for America:
“Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say colleges have a negative effect on the nation, according to the survey, which also polled respondents on institutions like churches, banks, the media and labor unions. Thirty-six percent of GOP survey participants say colleges are having a positive impact on the U.S. ”
After a precipitous drop over the last two years, just 36 percent of Republicans have a positive view of colleges. And that drop has been even more precipitous for younger Republicans:
Well that doesn’t bode well for the future. And it’s important to point out that the period of this large drop in support just happens to coincide with the Obama administration policies designed to address one of the key valid criticisms of US colleges: the prevalence of predatory for-profit ‘diploma mills’ that were major generators of student debt and useless degrees. That whole sector of the US higher education industry was facing serious obstacles following new Obama-era regulations in recent years and that’s the period of time when we saw this massive drop off in conservative support for American colleges.
So was the large drop off in conservative support for college due, in part, to new restrictions on predatory diploma mills? That’s pretty unlikely, which raises the question of where conservative support for colleges is going to go after the Trump administration lifts all those restrictions on predatory for-profit colleges? Are we going to see an even bigger drop on conservative support or will the renewed profitability of the diploma mill industry actually increase support? It’s an unpleasant question to have to ask, but that’s one of the positive things about college: it encourages people to ask unpleasant questions facing society and hopefully provide society some insightful answers. Including very complicated questions that aren’t driven by the profit-motive and might take years to ask and answer .
So if anyone is considering pursuing a degree in an area that involves writing a thesis on, say, public opinion and education policy, a thesis examining the impact of the lifting of rules barring predatory colleges on public support for colleges in general would probably be a pretty good thesis topic.