I saw that interview when it happened, and as I was watching it I knew that it was a bunch of alarmist crap. Not to say that what's going on down in Texas isn't alarming, 'cause it is, but the notion that they for a minute considered removing all references to Christmas and the Constitution isn't one of them. It's actually the liberal groups down there who are pushing for the removal from textbooks all references to religious holidays, and it's the liberal groups who are in the way, way, way minority down there.
The Texas School Board consists of 15 members, 10 of which are Republicans, and more importantly, unashamedly and blatantly ultra-religious.
This stuff going on down in Texas is important nationwide. Since Texas is the second largest consumer of textbooks in the U.S., publishers often create a book that meets Texas standards and then sell the same version to school districts across the country. Many places around the country get stuck with the same books, whether they like it or not.
Below is a disjointed amalgam of parts of news stories from a combination of several sources, like USA Today, UPI, AP, Dallas News, and others... Blogs excepted, of course.
The Board decreed that a list of people who were influential in fomenting revolutions would no longer include Thomas Jefferson. Why? The board’s not crazy about Jefferson because of the whole separation of church and state thing. But if the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence doesn’t meet your standards, maybe it’s really time to start listening to experts. Thomas Jefferson got replaced by John Calvin in a discussion of the impact of Enlightenment ideas, thanks to an amendment by board member Cynthia Dunbar.
High school students will learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s – but not about liberal or minority rights groups.
Board members also rejected requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy and new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage.
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.
In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word "capitalism" throughout their texts with the "free-enterprise system."
"Let's face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation," said one conservative member, Terri Leo. "You know, 'capitalist pig!' "
Many of the hundreds of line-by-line changes are tiny but carefully considered: this graphic shows how Richard Nixon's "role" in opening relations with China is to be changed to the more positive "leadership".
The U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic."
More space in the books will be devoted to the likes of Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.
Also, there will be new focus on "the importance of personal responsibility for life choices." Board member Barbara Cargill noted that sociology tends to blame society for everything. [that's a good thing]
There are thousands of changes, both large and small, but one of the biggest one is that Creationism is to be given at least as much weight and credibility as Evolution, even to the point where all of the Creationists ideas which point out (in their opinion, even in the face of incontrovertible evidence) the weakness of evolution that do not coincide with creationism.
