WaPo: Historians speak out against proposed Texas textbook changes

[marmar]

Historians speak out against proposed Texas textbook changes

By Michael Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 2010


Historians on Tuesday criticized proposed revisions to the Texas social studies curriculum, saying that many of the changes are historically inaccurate and that they would affect textbooks and classrooms far beyond the state's borders.

The changes, which were preliminarily approved last week by the Texas board of education and are expected to be given final approval in May, will reach deeply into Texas history classrooms, defining what textbooks must include and what teachers must cover. The curriculum plays down the role of Thomas Jefferson among the founding fathers, questions the separation of church and state, and claims that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists during the Cold War.

Because the Texas textbook market is so large, books assigned to the state's 4.7 million students often rocket to the top of the market, decreasing costs for other school districts and leading them to buy the same materials.

"The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they'll end up in other classrooms," said Fritz Fischer, chairman of the National Council for History Education, a group devoted to history teaching at the pre-college level. "It's not a partisan issue, it's a good history issue."

Each subject in Texas's curriculum is revised every 10 years, and the basic social studies framework was introduced by a panel of teachers last year. But the elected state board of education, which is comprised of 10 Republicans and five Democrats, has made more than 100 amendments to the curriculum since January. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031700560.html

[MisterP]

1. well, in the right wing's hermetic little world, historians have been trained by 60s

Commie plants who entered academia to brainwash Americans to hate America, and who propagate LIES such as El Mozote or the Contras.

that's how they get the notion of "librul media," which is hermetic in that any criticism of the idea has to come from non-FOX sources, and is thus false (though there's a skeptical variant of "you believe the NYT one day (when it reports the inspectors were not kicked out) but not the next (when it agrees on WMDs)")

it's the same mindset that's OK with Beck calling social justice "Nazi" and unChristian (with the implicit belief that only a fringe 1-5% of churches would believe something so anti-American, or, alternatively, the mainstream is corrupted and must be avoided), or the eternal Sinclair-Lewis "I don't know what it is, but I don't like it" (just ask most anticommunists why they hate Marx, and they'll just babble generalities about freedom, fluorine, or "their aggression in China and Cuba")