As if Texans weren’t generally conservative enough, now they will be indoctrinated in the public schools.
AUSTIN, Tex. — 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.
I suggest the rest of the country adopt textbooks that equate electing presidents from Texas with starting expensive land wars in Asia that cannot be won. Yeah, I know that Truman was from Missouri, by why stick with the facts?
Optional: teach students that all the Founding Fathers were into voodoo.
If someone can come up with enough basis for a lawsuit to slap a restraining order on this bunch of idiots, I think we might actually overturn the board enough by November to solve this specific problem. (I mean “we” literally, I’m in Texas.)
The larger issue of letting Texas set textbook standards for the rest of the country, though, remains to be dealt with. Maybe other states should abandon textbooks altogether and move to electronic/online media, thus bypassing the system completely.
Your suggestion about moving toward electronic/online media will, oddly enough, arrive in impoverished rural areas sooner than you may expect. In coastal NC, the state cannot pay enough to convince qualified teachers to live out here. Their solution is large-screen video systems with one teacher in Raleigh or Charlotte beaming out to multiple classrooms across the state. Students’ desks are being equipped with keyboards and smaller screens to allow taking tests, researching documents & email interactions. Classrooms will share printers for hard copies. “Monitors,” i.e., low-paid caretakers, will sit in the classrooms to maintain order. Many school/public libraries here already allow students/residents to “check out” laptops! Online textbooks will also be part of this system beginning next year.
Rural NC — where the next generation will never have to directly look a teacher in the eye!
I would think teachers could have a case that politically based “standards” like this violate their free speech rights. It’s insane that totally unqualified politicians get to micromanage what professional teachers do.
The bottom line is, what the hell’s wrong with Texas, and why do the rest of us have to be in the same country with it? I think it’s a shame that all the pol talk about secession is just hot air.
From what I have read, these will be the textbooks that the rest of the country will use, as Texas makes most of the textbooks and it’s cheaper to buy the ones that have the highest runs, i.e. Texas is also biggest buyer, therefore those will be the ones most often purchased.
The larger textbook companies routinely do regionally adapted editions. They couldn’t sell a Texas book in CA, for example. Their record of caving to even the most idiotic pols in Texas and elsewhere has been pretty shameful for the most part.
Textbooks have always been of questionable value, but in most parts of the country they’re now a lot more honest then they were a few decades ago. In the intelligent parts of the country there’s a trend to use more source material, including the Net, and less prepackaged stuff from the educational publishers. In places like Texas, who knows. With a school system run by morons, the schools themselves will do the kids a lot more harm than just textbooks.
I just had a thought — standardized testing, which has increased in popularity with the cries for accountability, might likewise increase the use of standardized texts. Testing isn’t new but it’s a good excuse to demand the purchase of new materials.
I’ve had to wonder if one of the elements in the attack on education is the motivation to sell new texts.
The following report is an excellent treatment of the subject.
http://www.commonwealinstitute.org/cw/files/Responding_Ed_Report%20from%20CI%20website_0.pdf
Last night on our local Ca. news, they did in fact say that Ca was likely to get these books.
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Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills
DRAFT Proposed Revisions
World History Studies (pdf)
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."sigh
National curriculum…it’s time for one.
That strikes me as a nightmare scenario.
Why’s that? The right-wing outcry or legitimate concerns? If so, what would those be?
I guess I don’t feel any need to rescue places like Texas from their own idiocy. National curriculum standards would be set by education-school academics who are generally the bane of good teachers. At the same time they’d be political and thus inevitably sink to the standard of being the least offensive to the most ignorant — ie, just more pablum for everybody, nationwide. At least now there are places in the country where good educators can try something new and better, or just more competent and honest. I see no reason we should all be dragged down toward the level of places like Texas, Kansas, and western PA.
Did you hear about Obama and his education comments Friday(it might have been Thursday). Basically, educators from across the US gathered to plot the way forward for education and Obama said something about national standards. And Governor Good-hair(that’s Perry of Texas for those that don’t know) didn’t waste 5 minutes in telling the educators, and Obama, to stick it where the sun don’t shine. I just wanna know how the state of LBJ, Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower became so messed up.
Standards probably meant more national test stuff than curriculum. I don’t think the feds micromanaging curriculum content is much of an improvement over Texas dimwits doing so.
I’m all in favor of nat’l curriculum standards.
“One America” Obama should be, too. We shouldn’t have two sets of US History being taught out there, one mostly true for some of the Blue states and one mostly false for the rest of the country.
Here’s hoping Obama can show he’s at least tough enough, ferchrissakes, to stand up to one yahoo governor and his wacky school board.
The trick would be to get people to think these new standards are somehow the result of Republican bigwigs in another part of the country. Texans seem so devoted to bucking other people’s will, they’d shoot themselves in the foot hurrying to get rid of this crap.
The Texas Board of Education reviewers are the very definition of a complete and fatal disconnect. They claim they want to stress American exceptionalism and explain its roots. So then they dump the writings of Thomas Jefferson in favor of John Calvin (a French Catholic) and Thomas Aquinas (an Italian priest)to prove their point. The logic is obtuse and the reasoning is absurd. I suppose the next step to to completely eliminate all written history of Paine, Madison, et al. Who needs founding fathers when we have Phylis Schafley and the Moral Majority.
This whole charade is because of Texas’s supposed dominance in the text book publishing game.
Why isn’t there a multi-state consortium of buyers? I dunno a North East governors conference of buyers or a mid-Atlantic one.
This seems so easily offset that the whole thing says to me that that the victims are even more stupid than the perps. And that is deeply stupid.
It was previously counterbalanced to some degree by California’s influence but California isn’t buying any tests right now because of its economic problems, which are in part the result of Proposition 13’s 2/3rds requirement that gives conservatives there a veto over increases in educational funding.
Here’s a good article on this subject.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html#Byline
At present, I’m wondering if public education will survive at all in our state after the governor and his henchmen finish pulling a Grover Norquist on it.
They came up with an easy formula:
Makes great neocon sense, since it rids school payrolls of large quantities of teachers, pleases the teabaggers no end and pisses off the teacher unions. Indiana is projected to lose 5,000 teacher positions this year.
Textbooks are a minor concern here at this point.
I predict blowback from parents.