Texas Education Board Approves Conservative Curriculum Changes By Far-Right

Think Progress flags some of the more eye-opening revisions the Texas Board of Education approved for its social studies curriculum and textbooks:

- The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, "replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin."

- The Board refused to require that "students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others."


April Castro, ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN, Texas — A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade.

Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

"We have been about conservatism versus liberalism," said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. "We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."

Following three days of impassioned and acrimonious debate, the board gave preliminary approval to the new standards with a 10-5 party line vote. A final vote is expected in May, after a public comment period that could produce additional amendments and arguments.

Decisions by the board – made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others – can affect textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.

Ultraconservatives wielded their power over hundreds of subjects this week, introducing and rejecting amendments on everything from the civil rights movement to global politics. Hostilities flared and prompted a walkout Thursday by one of the board's most prominent Democrats, Mary Helen Berlanga of Corpus Christi, who accused her colleagues of "whitewashing" curriculum standards.

By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding "American exceptionalism" and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

"Some board members themselves acknowledged this morning that the process for revising curriculum standards in Texas is seriously broken, with politics and personal agendas dominating just about every decision," said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which advocates for religious freedom.

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards "world class" and "exceptional."

Board members argued about the classification of historic periods (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will).

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class.

Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.

Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie. Another amendment deleted a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

Democrats did score a victory by deleting a portion of an amendment by Republican Don McLeroy suggesting that the civil rights movement led to "unrealistic expectations for equal outcomes."

Fort Worth Republican Pat Hardy, a longtime teacher, voted for the new standards, but said she wished the board could work with a more cooperative spirit.

"What we've done is we've taken a document that by nature is too long to begin with and then we've lengthened it some more," Hardy said, shortly after the vote. "Those long lists of names that we've put in there ... it's just too long.

"I just think we failed to keep that in mind, it's hard for teachers to get through it all."

If the Alamo had a back door San Antonio would still be in Mexico

I don't know what's scarier: the fact that something like this is actually happening and/or the fact that there are people out there that support those who think this way and/or think this way themselves!

And we still have Christmas trees in Texas and say a prayer before each high school football game.

GOD BLESS TEXAS!

That's all fine and dandy but when a group of right-wing radicals such as these in the article decide to take matters into their own hands and rewrite history and incorporate religious elements, such as eliminating one of our founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson) and replace him with a religious figure (John Calvin) in the history books, that is indeed troublesome and pretty scary.

p.s. Where in the US are there not Christmas tree during Christmas? As far as the prayer before a game many teams still excercise praying before a game, only that many prefer to do it in their locker room. Claiming your state "still has" these things does not make you any more "holy" or sanctified, nor does it place above any other state for that matter and is nothing to brag about quite frankly.

The Board refused to require that "students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others."

Ah, perhaps because it is true. The Constitution founders were specific - they did nto want the gov. to support or promote one SECT/DENOMINATION over another, but it was undestood that ALL were Christian based as was he the country they established. 100% of the schools and universities were CHRISTIAN (Yale, Harvard, Princeton etc) and so were the people and the founders.

The real revisionist idiots are the secualrists who today try so very desperately (against all the evidence ) to suggest that the USA was secular when it was actually founded BY Christians upon Christian principles.

Hmm, if you look closely at 99% of the founding fathers, by YOUR definition, they were all extreme
right-wing radicals

It is the secualrists who are trying to re-write history!


America's Godly Heritage

Active humanists and the liberal media have for years undertaken a concentrated effort to misinform the American public by attacking the "Religious Right" and rewriting America's Judeo-Christian history in a humanistic tone. The motto at the heart of the American experiment "in God we trust" has been exchanged for "in Man we trust."

Rewriting History
The last three generations of Americans simply have not been told the truth about American history as its Christian heritage has been disparaged.

For example, ask most Americans if the "separation of church and state" is in our Constitution, and they will answer yes. You can scour the Constitution of the United States, and you will NOT find the phrase, "separation of church and state" or anything close to it.

While the concept of separation of church and state might be implied by the First Amendment which states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof....", it says nothing about the "separation of church and state."

And, even if you accept the principle of the separation of church and state being implied by the First Amendment, it's implication is not there to protect Americans from religion, it is there to protect religious Americans from the government.


In their desire to promote their secular humanist philosophy using the power of government, many liberals today want to alter America's Christian heritage and replace it with the 10 Planks of Communism. They want to remove religion from our history and replace it with the Soviet doctrine of the separation of Church and State. They don't want to safeguard denominational neutrality by the state as the Founders intended, rather they want to eradicate every vestige of religion from our public institutions.


The Educational Establishment
One reason we have lost so many of our religious freedoms is that the liberal educational establishment has worked hard to eliminate our knowledge of the Judeo-Christian heritage of America. The facts nonetheless reveal the true convictions of our founders. Without question, they believed that although no one Christian denomination should dominate the nation, the principles of the Bible and Christianity should underlie our government and American education as well.

"It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists but by Christians, not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ." - Patrick Henry

"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers and it is the duty as well as the privilege and interest of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers." - U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay

The liberties we talk about defending today were established by men who took their conceptions of man from the great central religious tradition of Western civilization [Christianity], and the liberties we inherit can almost certainly not survive the abandonment of that tradition. The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as someone more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey. This is the forgotten foundation of democracy." [James Reston, "Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still?" The New York Times, April 2, 1969]

[B]Our children's history books are being rewritten so they no longer hear the truth about the tremendous influence of religious faith on America's founding fathers, on the great documents they drafted to establish a true republic based, on the critical tripod of liberty, life, and family.[/B] [COLOR=#ED1C24]The revisionist history being taught now is devoid of any reference to the Christian faith of our Founding Fathers as the old stories, the old way that American history was taught, was revised to reflect a more liberal, politically correct, homogenized and multicultural perspective.[/COLOR][B][/B]

Have you not realized that you just wrote a contradictory statement? Even if they were all Christian, they still believed in allowing the freedom to allow citizens to excercise their own chosen religion and not with imposing Christianity on everyone as right-wing radicals such as yourself seem to believe in.

Words like duty and honor and country have fallen out of vogue, and the stories of the Christian faith of men like George Washington and Patrick Henry and Noah Webster and so many others, Daniel Webster, Andy Jackson, Chief Justice John Marshall - magnificent Christians - these stories are simply left out.

While many may squabble over who among the founding fathers was a Christian, no knowledgeable historian of early American history can deny the fact that the concept of a Creator God who endowed His creation with "unalienable rights" was an essential underpinning of the American experiment. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence states, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." These rights were derived not from a government that was transitory, but from a Governor who was eternal. It was the role of government to defend these rights and not dilute or remove them.

The revisionists extend the influence of their world view outside the classroom as well into nearly every segment of American life. Descriptions and tours of the nation's capitol, for example, fail to point out that the Ten Commandments are inscribed in the marble of the United States Supreme Court, that there is a beautiful stained glass window in the U.S. Capitol depicting President George Washington kneeling in prayer, and that at the top of the Washington Monument - the highest point in the nation's capital is embedded a plaque which boldly proclaims in Latin, "Praise Be Unto God."