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20100313

Home Schooling is starting to sound better and better

Quoted almost in its entirety from Think Progress:

The Texas Board of Education has been meeting this week to revise its social studies curriculum. During the past three days, “the board’s far-right faction wielded their power to shape lessons on the civil rights movement, the U.S. free enterprise system and hundreds of other topics”:

– To avoid exposing students to “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else,” the Board struck the curriculum’s reference to “sex and gender as social constructs.”

– 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.”

– The Board struck the word “democratic” from the description of the U.S. government, instead terming it a “constitutional republic.”


As the nation’s second-largest textbook market, Texas has enormous leverage over publishers, who often “craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers.” Indeed, as The Washington Monthly has reported, “when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas.”


Update Following repeated failed attempts to add figures in Hispanic history to the textbooks, one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, stormed "out of the meeting late Thursday night, saying, 'They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.'

1 comment:

  1. I once drove through Texas. Years ago. I can't remember off hand what part it was but the landscape was extremely bleak and endless. Nothing there. Every thirty or forty miles or so there would be a gas station or lunch counter on the road. And outside, sitting in the sun, there would always be this local with a totally mad expression on his face. One expressive of the vast bleak empty panorama all around. Think of it. This poor geek sitting out there day after day with nothing there. Absolutely nothing. But an occasional passing truck or car.

    So it has always seemed somewhat normal to me that Texas is absolutely mad. That while baking out there under the sun in a vast waste thoughts of god knows what eventually occupy the head. And the geek sitting there looks out at the passing truck or car as just another mirage passing before his eyes. Quivering off the road with the heat. And nothing there to occupy him off this enormous boredom.

    And that in this world it is completely natural to believe Mars has landed, setting up a distribution center where Earthlings will be sorted out, farmed, and sent home in the mother ship to feed the starving Martian children. Because.......

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