Texas....keep'en 'em ignorant

In another landmark decision by the Texas State Board of Education, the propagation of falsifying history to fit the backwards beliefs of a few, have once again altered the history books in favor of myth over fact. Amazing!
http://www.newslo.com/texas-board-of-education-revises-textbooks-slaves-were-unpaid-interns/

 

Yeah, and the Native Americans were only keeping the country warm for the European invaders and there was no genocide. The Native American populations voluntarily starved, abandoned their homelands, murdered each other to make way for the whites, and placed themselves on reservations until they were impoverished enough to just die from neglect and disease. Texas repukes! The worst of the repukes.

 

It's satire, dummy! Not very good satire, but satire nonetheless.

 

How can you tell?


How Texas' School Board Tried to Pretend Slavery Never Happened and Why Your Kid's School May Be Next

While the rest of the nation was distracted by mid-term primaries, the Gulf oil spill, or where LeBron James will play next season, a handful of conservatives in Texas quietly plotted to rewrite history and reshape the education -- and the minds -- of nearly five million young Texans. And perhaps your child, too.

How? By pushing to erase the mention of the word "slavery" in parts of their textbooks and trying to pretend Barack Obama was never elected president.
Seriously, I'm not making this up.

After two years of heated political debate, the Texas State Board of Education spent the past week incorporating their own conservative values into final guidelines for history and social studies classes taught in the state's public schools for the next 10 years. They voted late Friday to adopt a host of sweeping changes. In the process, their decisions may force the entire nation to also adopt their radical right-wing re-write of history.

Among the proposed changeswere plans to "teach" children to challenge the "solvency" of "long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare" and other euphemistic views of history that, for example, would refer to the slave trade as simply the "Atlantic triangular trade." Oh, the conservative members of the board also hoped that no one noticed that they omitted from textbooks the name of the 44th President of The United States: Barack Obama.

The last two proposals were eventually amended. The "Atlantic triangular trade" language was finally changed to the "trans-Atlantic slave trade." And one Republican board member ultimately relented in his demand to refer to the first black president only by his full name: Barack Hussein Obama.

They even tried to remove Thomas Jefferson from a list of American history's key thinkers. He was one of the founding architects of the modern philosophy of church/state separation, as well as the author of that obscure document called the Declaration of Independence. So naturally he had to go. That move failed.
Still in the document, however, were other proposals that would water down Sen. Joseph McCarthy's generally repudiated anti-communist hearings in the 1950s and restrict inclusion of some modern Latino leaders in textbooks.

So, why should you care what a group of right-wing administrators are doing to shape the minds of 4.8 million children in the third largest state in the union? Well, beyond the obvious -- these are 4.8 million black, brown, yellow AND white kids whose education is at stake -- the state of Texas also has tremendous power over shaping the content of textbooks for the rest of the nation. Ultimately the have a say in what our kids learn no matter where we live.

The Lone Star State has historically wielded potent, although waning, buying power with the nation's leading K-through-12 textbook publishers. This year, Texas is expected to spend as much as $1 billion buying books. Book orders that large tend to influence, if not dictate, what goes onto the pages in those textbooks not just in Texas, but nationwide. It's often been cheaper for publishers to print one social studies textbook for 50 million 7th graders in several states, rather than customize 50 different textbooks for each. Even as other states are having similar debates, publishers may now have to see if that practice still makes sense.

You'd think that conservatives who advocate smaller government would shudder at the thought of allowing state government bureaucrats to use their power to brainwash the minds of young students. But I guess they missed that part of their neo-con class.

Not only is it dangerous to deliberately manipulate what goes on in classrooms in order to commandeer the pliable minds of our children, it is antithetical to the basic values most educators expect of themselves and their colleagues. These changes legislate ignorance, plain and simple. And, it is just plain wrong. Our schools should be a place where children learn truth, curiosity, critical thought and discovery, not political dogma and early-stage indoctrination for the ultra-liberal left or arch-conservative right.

Our politicians should know better, our educators surely want better and our students really deserve better.

 

I was going to post something similar. Interesting how the liberals run with these twisted facts.

 

....I think we'll all be pushing to erase the memory of Barack Hussein Obama's presidency before long...

 

Ho-ly chit...

...what a load of republicans.

Satire or not, republicans ARE like that.

 

Hey, stupid! No Republican wrote that. Some liberal wrote it to demean republicans.

 

Satire it may be, but it was based on the horrifying truth:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

 

Wait 'till Hillary wins in '16, that's when you'll really see the republicans hit the fan.

 

A lot of innuendo and little facts!

 

I suppose you won't accept anything short of a signed affidavit from the TSBA.

 

The "story" was from 2010, in case you missed that part. And how much of it became a reality?

 

If anyone is stupid enough to believe the article in the OP, well... what have I always said about "low information" liberals?

View attachment 1906

 

Guy, I can understand how Little Joe Nation and IQLessThan1 fell for that, but.. come on, you're not THAT stupid.... are you??

 

The first was was satirical based on past decisions that were real. I think what I was trying to point out is the absolute disregard for teaching history and instead watering down or plain rewriting the parts that don't fit into a particular societies ideal way of thinking. Rewriting doesn't literally erase the past, but teach the reimagined version to enough generations and it might as well have never happened. The real examples are obviously not as blatantly false as the op link, but they are just as irresponsibly dangerous. Texas may be a worst case example, but it's happening everywhere. I know this will get twisted into a them/us political crap slinger, but how much more can we dumb down our society?

 

...but it was a joke from 3 1/2 years ago...there was no basis in reality!

 

If you really think that was real, why would Williams, Harris-Perry, Maddow, Matthews, Schultz, etc. not have 24/7 coverage? As for watering down history, I wish I could find some of the liberal watering down history that they have return to non-fiction.

 

Not that it seems to matter but here's an article from this year stating that this was taking place as recently as the end of last year, at least in Texas: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/...as-board-of-ed-loses-its-power-over-textbooks
The fact is they did rewrite the books based on political and religious beliefs not facts. Are you still going to deny that?

 

And rlm I'm not trying to pin this on conservatives. Both sides are responsible. Of course that's just my liberalism talking I'm sure.