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Texas to Teach Extreme Right Version of History
This is frightening – preliminary approval has been given by the Texas Board of Education to a list of right-wing, reactionary, anti-civil-rights, anti-women’s-rights changes to the Texas history program. What’s worse is that Texas prints many of the textbooks used across the United States – a country that doesn’t have a reputation for particularly responsible public education in the first place. This Change.org petition aims to protest these changes. Read more about it there.
March 26th, 2010 at 2:28 am
Just scary. And wrong.
March 26th, 2010 at 7:15 pm
Who controls the past controls the future.
Who controls the present controls the past.
- George Orwell
March 31st, 2010 at 2:54 am
Oh Texas. What will you try next?
People would be surprised though, even though Texas does shit like this, and it obviously has a negative effect later in the children’s lives as they interact with others and pursue education elsewhere, there remain many people who are very open-minded and highly intelligent in the state. Many of them reside in Austin, but San Antonio, Houston and Dallas also have a lot of diverse sharp minds who are not limited by the neo-conservative curriculum that controls much of the public and private learning institutions. Since I’ve grown up in Texas and experienced both public and private schooling, I have an intimate understanding of it. I always recall a moment in my sophomore year in high school when I wrote a paper defending Nixon…yeah…I know I was a kid for fuck sake okay, didn’t know anything at all, and working with the materials I had in a small town in Texas, back when our school had very very strict limitations on Internet usage making us rely on books available within the curriculum. I still recall that paper and just shake my head and laugh.
Unfortunately, there are kids who adhered to those ideas and never let go, and sometimes even develop a very radically religious/political perspective in the process. I think Texas does this out of fear, honestly. They fear a lot of things around them now that Obama is President and they push things even farther than they would normally just because he’s President. It’s unfortunate for the children and struggling parents, but hey, now that kids today get most of the information off unrestricted internet outside of school, many of them will wise up and rise up on their own. Which would give thought to the inadvertent result of Texas helping fuel the rise of of individuals who develop a strong distrust of the system because of the lies imposed upon them from family and teachers. It really is just a messed up situation. Good to see our neighbors to the north are interested in this subject though. It helps. Thank you.