San Francisco Chronicle: Teach your children not so well

Jon Carroll
Wednesday, May 26, 2010


I'm not worried about the children of Texas, although maybe I should be. No matter what their Board of Education says, the truth is out there. The wishing-makes-it-so approach of the board is, I hope, futile, a rearguard action fought by frightened people. It's all nostalgia, which comes from a Greek word meaning "homesickness." These school board tea-baggers want to go home again, except home has moved and left no forwarding address.

The America they want to bring back has gone, like so many other things of the past. (Actually, the America they want to bring back never existed; it's just some loopy construct of cowboy movies and Ayn Rand and nice poor people who knew their place.) In the nostalgic America, you learned what your parents wanted you to learn, and not what was actually true. It's ignorance enshrined.

So what did the Texas Board of Education do this year? Well, first it forbade the using of the terms of C.E. and B.C.E., meaning "Christian era" and "before Christian era," on the grounds, well, that we'd be taking Christ out of our dating system. How shocking for true believers. The B of E favors the old-fashioned B.C. and A.D., meaning "before Christ" and "anno Domini," meaning "in the year of our Lord."

....(snip)....

So no Jefferson, but a requirement to teach the importance of "the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association." The importance of the ACLU is, curiously, not mentioned.

Oh, and they also mandated the replacement of the word "capitalism" with the phrase "free enterprise system." Alas, considering huge government subsidies to oil companies and agribusiness companies, it's not even true. T'aint nothing free about the free market system, as some of us to our sorrow have learned recently.

Pretty disheartening, yes? But, as I say, the Texas kids who test these ideas against the real world may face some mind-altering conversations. I just hope they don't have to wait as long as Rand Paul did. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/25/DDKU1DJR9C.DTL

are then used by other school districts all over the country. So, this re-writing of history will wind up being taught nationwide.

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New textbook standards approved in Texas are poised to revolutionize public-school curricula nationwide, and liberal educators are furious. Every year the Texas State Board of Education revises a particular subject curriculum, outlining rules that school districts must follow in purchasing teaching materials with state money. Since Texas is the single largest purchaser of textbooks in the country, it holds sway over content of books available on the market to all states.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/culture/education/3148-texas-textbook-massacre