Texas publishes many of the school textbooks for schools around the U.S. This week, the fifteen-member Texas school board has decided to re-write some of American history as we have known it. The board is taking a more right-wing conservative stand on history, including placing a more important role on religion and lessening the role of Thomas Jefferson due to their belief that he was too secular.
One big reason for the religious push is to illustrate that there “would be no United States if it had not been for God.” The history books will question the seperation of church and state, believing there should be a more religious base to politics. They believe education should teach children about the “superiority of American capitalism.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLt_IYDSQ4w[/youtube]
The new curriculum will also include a heavy focus on the 2nd amendment which is the right of every US citizen to bear arms and support the NRA (the National Rifle Association). On a more important note, the Texas board of education is watering down the historical impact and roles of slavery and the civil rights movement. The NAACP is pushing the Texas school board of education to revisit its recommended changes in order to preserve the accurate history of America concering slaver and the civil rights movement.
Daily Show Textbook Video Clip
What are your thoughts on this change to American history? Is this just as bad as most of us learning that Pluto was a planet and now it’s just a glorified “dwarf planet?” Do you think politics and government are playing too big a role in our education and our history?
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1. this is terrible.
2. this is worse. science reclassified it and most scientists already knew it wasn’t a planet.
3. yes, but they always have this is nothing new. look at how much coverage textbooks are giving to the Sppanish-American war compared to the war between the pilgrims and the aborigines.
the oscar romero controversy on the daily show was ridiculous. what is history for?? to tell us what we know??
history needs to be taught as an evolving vision of our world and not as facts.
both sides of the debate try to do this. forcing one side’s heroes down one’s throats does no good.
critically evaluate and think objectively about events!!!
I totally agree with you Kyle; as a Social Studies Teacher I feel completely violated by these new standards and I feel that my profession within Texas is undermined. Sadly, the majority of textbooks from the US are printed in Texas and the Social Studies War will wage on (since it has been a debate for decades now).
This is aweful. History is history not something to be changed. Also pushing religion in a text book, will take our country off the path of diversity, which in a meltingpot (Yes, I learned that world in US History) such as America we NEED the diversity.