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Sunday, March 14, 2010

Jefferson, Ted Kennedy, Others to be Assassinated From Texas School Book Depository
Posted by jurassicpork | 1:05 PM

Be afraid. Be very afraid because the Lee Harvey Oswalds of the Texas Board of Education are taking aim at Thomas Jefferson, Ted Kennedy, Margaret Sanger and others figuratively from Texas School Book Depositories.

I can understand the knee jerk rationale for allowing Texas's Board of Education for having so much sway over the nation's curriculum for children K-12. They're simply one of the largest markets for schoolbook publishers in the nation. But they're not the largest. That distinction, as you can expect, goes to more liberal California, the state with the largest population. Yet why is Texas allowed to take point on revising not only established curriculums but even history? Why are we letting a small handful of 10 Republican zealots brainwash our children in 49 states?

James McKinley, Jr. of the NY Times wrote,
Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

McLeroy was recently "primaried" off the school board and, as with every single member of the school board, is not an accredited expert in history, sociology or economics. McLeroy, in fact, is a dentist.

Among the changes to the social studies curriculum:

  • Excluding birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger for "promoting eugenics."

  • Excluding any mention of Senator Ted Kennedy, apparently just on general principle.

  • Ensuring that children know about the Black Panthers and their legacy of violence as a necessary counterpoint to the far more influential and larger nonviolent approach of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

  • Excluding and ignoring the accomplishments of Latin Americans such as labor leader Cesar Chavez

  • Virtually expunging Thomas Jefferson, our third president, the nation's first Republican and the author of the Declaration of Independence for authoring the phrase, "the wall separating church and state."

    • So what will be included in our nation's social studies curriculum?

    Antisemite Billy Graham. Scandal-ridden former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his colossal failure more popularly known as the Contract With America. The superiority of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter and Milton Freidman's brand of free market economics that has been the ruination of this country since Ronald Reagan. The Moral Majority. The NRA. Phyllis Schlafly. The list goes on and on and on.

    In fact, the very word "capitalism" has been struck from the entire curriculum because of the connotation of the phrase "capitalist pig" and replaced with "free enterprise system."

    In other words, these Republican white boarders want to roll American history back to before the Monterey Music Festival in June of 1967 and to just pretend that Jimi Hendrix, Cesar Chavez, Abby Hoffman and Mort Saul were never born.

    In other words, while boasting of no expert knowledge whatsoever, our nation's next cycle of schoolbooks will be teaching curricula that extols only white Republicans and peaceful negroes like Dr. King.

    "Balance?" Yeah, like Fox "News" is balanced.

    It's bad enough that technology now allows school book publishers to tailor make their products to suit individual states such as Texas. What's intolerably horrifying is that one school board made up of ten ideological zealots get to largely determine the propaganda our schoolchildren will be fed from coast to coast.
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    3 Comments:
    Anonymous Anonymous said...
    We will soon see if the ordinary people in TexAss are ignorant as fence posts or actually have the guts and determination to ensure that their children have a decent education.

    TexAss deserves exactly what they get. Fortunately, their children will be undereducated and barred from all cultural activities in the future. This will lead to a large gain in opportunities for creators from other states without the competition from TexAss children.

    I lived briefly east of Houston, 7 months in Lubbock and on Padre Island several times. I will drive 500 extra miles to avoid even going into TexAss.

    If they want their children to only be capable of doing blue collar manual labor, fine.

    Unfortunately, the rich's kids will go to private schools, get a decent education and hire the ignorant's children.

    They will certainly have a good supply of cheap white labor, in a couple of years, to replace all of those brown people that they currently employ.
    3/14/10, 6:41 PM  
    Blogger casey said...
    Hello JP,

    This is Texas so what else is new? Nothing to see here move along.
    3/14/10, 10:55 PM  
    Anonymous Blue Girl said...
    **Snort!**

    Talk about 'Titles I wish I had Written! Fucking Brilliant!
    3/16/10, 3:51 PM  
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