Quoted from Huffingtonpost.com:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said school officials “should keep politics out” of curriculum debates.

“We do a disservice to children when we shield them from the truth, just because some people think it is painful or doesn’t fit with their particular views,” Duncan said in a statement. “Parents should be very wary of politicians designing curriculum.”

Most of us agree with Secretary Duncan. And this statement works both ways, whether it is from the Democrats, the Republicans, or whatever else is deemed politically correct at the time. Social Studies seems to get the brunt of being tossed around political alley and this time, Texas has really re-invented history.

This week the Texas Board of Education approved a far more conservative curriculum. A couple of months ago ‘howlings took a look at the proposal. Not much has changed:

During the months-long revision process, conservatives strengthened requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers and required that the U.S. government be referred to as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic.” Students will be required to study the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

They also rejected language to modernize the classification of historic periods to B.C.E. and C.E. from the traditional B.C. and A.D., and agreed to replace Thomas Jefferson as an example of an influential political philosopher in a world history class. They also required students to evaluate efforts by global organizations such as the United Nations to undermine U.S. sovereignty.

Former board chairman Don McLeroy, one of the board’s most outspoken conservatives, said the Texas history curriculum has been unfairly skewed to the left after years of Democrats controlling the board and he just wants to bring it back into balance.

It seems that it would be best to just deal with facts rather than the continual interpretations. No wonder kids perform so abysmally on routine history type questions. The answers keep changing.

Years ago kids studied a lot more geography. They knew about far away places most of them would probably never travel to. Today, most Americans are fairly ignorant about ‘where’ types of questions. How many of us would score 50% on naming the countries of Africa on an outline map? How about Europe? Asia? How about naming the countries of South America? How about the provinces of Canada? Yet our ability to travel to these places is fairly easy, given the affordability of air fares. Perhaps some good old fashioned geography ought to take the place of all this controversy.

If that doesn’t work, how about studying the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery exploration?  It might give us more of an appreciation of who we are and how we got to be who we are. One person died–and he died of appendicitis. Those people traveled thousands of miles 200 years ago. The Corps of Discovery went across the nation, over uncharted territory. They braved wild animals, mosquitoes and other insects, native people, sickness, huge mountains, raging rivers, freezing weather, snow storms of epic proportion, all sorts of dangers. And other than the one guy with appendicitis, every last one of them made it home. Maybe Texas needs a lesson in what it is all really about. That was Mr. Jefferson’s dream. Perhaps he shouldn’t be dissed quite so rapidly.

Jefferson bought the vast expansion of land from the French–the Lousiana Purchase. He then arranged to have it explored–not by an army but by a band of men. The leaders were his Virginia neighbors. He scraped together financing for the trip. He set goals and objectives for the group. They were mapmakers, scientists, doctors, hunters, gatherers, climatologists, diplomats, whatever it took.

Texas needs to stop playing politics with American history.  Kids are a captive audience.  Many of their parents don’t know any better.  Texas textbooks will dominate education in all states during this adoption.  Texas needs to look at the Virginian–the quintessential Virginian whose insight and foresight made it all possible.  TJ could teach them all a thing or two.

“. . . the object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, and such principal streams of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river, may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce . . .”

 

More on The Corps of Discovery

8 Thoughts to “Curriculum, Texas Style”

  1. Wolverine

    I’d certainly like to see how they deal with the Revolution and the period of Jefferson’s presidency. I wouldn’t believe it possible to eliminate that guy and his historical role from an American history book, no matter how hard you tried.

  2. Totally agree, Wolverine. There is no way to downplay Jefferson.

    I have also been very grossed out over the years over some of the inaccurate leftist spin garbage I have seen in some textbooks.

    I hate that history is politicized this much.

  3. KimS

    I’m pretty shocked that they would eliminate Jefferson. I’m equally shocked that a the history standards would call for examining the effects of the gold standard on the value of the US dollar – I’d expect that sort of examination in a senior level economics class.

    I’m not as concerned with Texas playing around with history standards as some are. Yes, Texas buys a lot of textbooks and textbook publishers provide books that meet their standards. But with the Common Core History standards set to be drafted in the next few years and Virginia a full participant in the effort, I think Texas’ ability to influence what ends up in history textbooks is limited.

  4. Why don’t they like Jefferson?

    Has history become like a scrapbook–if you don’t like someone, crop him out?

    Incidentally, 5th graders in PWC now have an entire year devoted to geography. They also have focused on the explorers. About the only “radical” thing I have heard from my daughter was the emphasis that the Brits weren’t trying to be unfair about taxes–they wanted the colonies to pay taxes so the Brits could continue to defend the “new world” with militia. I don’t recall learning that aspect of the revolutionary period, but then again, I lived in a place where revolutionary war re-enactments were frequent and the Red Coats were portrayed as evil doers.

  5. Maybe that is the new ‘taxation without representation’ explanation. Actually it makes a lot of sense. I got the old version when I was a kid.

  6. Captain Idiot-Face

    Did you catch the joke? “Quoted from Huffington Post”? Good One. You’re a little mixed up, though, they’re keeping liberals from reinventing history. In Mexifornia, they want to replace the term “founding fathers” with “framers” because the former sounds too “male-centric”. And Texas is rewriting history? LOL.

  7. I am not willing to pitch Thomas Jefferson because some Texan cowboy wants it to happen.

    And who cares whether someone says framers or fathers. I would feel comfortable using either interchangeably. Obviously, they were all male.

    CIF, have you ever demanded that something be politically neutral? Try it, you might like it.

  8. Rick Bentley

    “I have also been very grossed out over the years over some of the inaccurate leftist spin garbage I have seen in some textbooks. ”

    Yeah. I think this is more about correcting bias and presenting mutliple viewpoints than it is anything harmful.

    I flipped past CNN the other night through and saw a bunch of liberals snickering at Texas and basically intimating that this was wrong, bad, stupid, and would be perceived as such by most Americans. Rather than a meaningful dialogue on details.

    Bottom line the more viewpoints, the better. Teach them to think, not what to think.

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