The New Right History

A Christian Land ...
By SAUL LANDAU

The Texas State Board of Education approved a new social studies curriculum to reflect American History as it should have happened. Board member Cynthia Dunbar (R) elucidated the core of the Board’s premise: America was and should be “a Christian land governed by Christian principles.”

After reading this news -- Texas is the textbook industry’s second-largest customer --authors, seeing the chance to make a fortune, sent proposals to the school board and text-book publishers. I quote from one proposal found near the Senate office of Republican Jim DeMint (SC) who coincidentally supports rewriting textbooks.

As an historian, I abhor the liberal slant on our nation’s heroic background and commend your stressing in the new texts American uniqueness and conservative values. My text would begin with God introducing European royalty to His idea of exploring the New World.

He wanted savages occupying this land of opportunity to hear His word before He condemned them to eternal damnation. God had offered them use of His abundant resources and grown weary watching them waste the opportunities.

These so-called Indians killed animals only when they needed food, lacking the imagination to hunt them for sport. 1960s liberal texts glorified these barbarians and also overvalued men -- barely Christian -- like Thomas Jefferson, whose sole accomplishment was acquiring the Louisiana territory from Napoleon.

My text would not adore Lincoln, who started the War of Northern Aggression. I would elevate the maligned Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America and require students to read (ideally memorize) President Davis's classic inaugural address, and learn the names of other great figures of the Confederacy. During that sad war, southern newspapers would not mention Lincoln’s name. Indeed, after the patriot John Wilkes Booth shot him, The Richmond Gazette appropriately headlined the news: “Actor Breaks Leg!”

Post Civil War history got re-written, turning genteel southern plantation owners into monsters who mistreated Negro slaves. In fact, this refined social class epitomized civilization’s virtues. Compare their benign social rule to those plundering carpetbaggers and scallywags during the Reconstruction era. They forced brave Southerners to join the Ku Klux Klan to defend local culture.

The subversive texts assume a dubious evolution theory and also propagate a treacherous streak of radical feminism. Imagine crediting women for winning their right to vote in 1920, without acknowledging that only men voted for the 19th amendment giving the weaker sex that privilege.

The women’s vote did not deter the sagacious electorate from choosing Republican President Warren G. Harding, a man given too little play – except for his card playing – in radical history books.

Liberals called great entrepreneurs like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie “Robber Barons” instead of “Industrial Statesmen,” and portrayed with contempt fine presidents like Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover.

I show Harding’s presidency as employing conservative values and promoting fun. (Friendly White House poker games allowed businessmen to engaged the President and might help harmonize today’s political atmosphere.) Good conservatives didn’t tolerate gossip-spreading reporters to intrude on presidents’ privacy. Liberal-dominated texts overplayed the Teapot Dome affair, in which Harding’s business friends secured oil leases to ensure low-cost American energy supply.

My text shows FDR and his New Deal as a Satanic era, defying God’s free market principles and applying socialism to His natural market swings. This tendency to esteem rabble rousers became more became acute in the1960s when the mutinous Martin Luther King and the Mexican Caeser Chavez acquired unmerited pedestals.

Instead of praising the diligence of freedom-loving, anti-communist heroes like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joe McCarthy for rooting subversives out of government and elsewhere, the seditious texts applaud perverts like the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Chapaquidick fame and legal rebels like Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

What did they accomplish compared to the fabulous legacy of Ronald Reagan who created as near a miracle as one can accomplish by spending without raising taxes?

Under Reagan’s guidance, membership in the National Rifle Association grew, and Americans could hear a leader trumpeting our true heritage -- through the eyes of the Heritage Foundation, which keeps alive the patriotic flame of the old Moral Majority. During Reagan’s reign “sleeping with President” meant attending a Cabinet meeting, not some immoral act. Reagan fulfilled half of Ben Franklin’s adage: “early to bed.”

Reagan understood our exceptional history and God’s intention to arm citizens against trespassing humans and animals stupid enough to get into their gun range.

According to the Texas School Board, all students should be able to "describe the causes and key organizations and individuals of the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” That will happen when Texas adopts my text as required reading.

Sincerely,

Professor Scamming Shellgame, PhD. Bobby Jones University

TBoE Forces Conservatism Down the Throats of US School children

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhhh!

~#0#~

Texas State Board of Education Approves New Curriculum Standards
by Terrence Stutz

AUSTIN - In a landmark vote that will shape the future education of millions of Texas schoolchildren, the State Board of Education on Friday approved new curriculum standards for U.S. history and other social studies courses that reflect a more conservative tone than in the past.

Split along party lines, the board voted 9-5 to adopt the new standards, which will dictate what is taught in all Texas schools and provide the basis for future textbooks and student achievement tests over the next decade.

Texas standards often wind up being taught in other states because national publishers typically tailor their materials to Texas, one of the biggest textbook purchasers in the country.

Approval came after the GOP-dominated board approved a new curriculum standard that would encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation - a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer.

Before the final vote on the lengthy list of standards, the board's five Democrats criticized the Republican majority - primarily social conservatives - for injecting their political and religious views into the standards and giving short shrift to important minority figures in history.

Republicans called the standards a major step forward that will boost instruction in history, government and other social studies classes.

Regarding the complaint that Republicans and conservative ideology have been given more prominence, board member Don McLeroy, R-College Station, said the panel was trying to make up for the liberal-slanted curriculum now being used in schools.

"I think we've corrected the imbalance we've had in the past and now have our curriculum headed straight down the middle," said McLeroy, one of seven social conservatives on the board. "I'm very pleased with what we've accomplished.

Board Democrats accused the Republicans of a "cut-and-paste" job on the standards that included a flurry of late amendments undoing much of the work of teachers and academics who were appointed to review teams to draft the curriculum requirements last year.

"Here we are trying to approve standards for our children that will be used for years and we are being asked to approve all these last-minute cut-and-paste proposals," said Mary Helen Berlanga, D-Corpus Christi.

"I don't think any teacher would accept work like this," she said. "They would have thrown this paper in the trash. We've done an injustice to the children of this state."

Board member Mavis Knight, D-Dallas, called the proposal a "travesty."

"The board has made these standards political and had little academic discussion about what students need to learn," she said. "I am ashamed of what we have done to the students and teachers of this state."

Several Republicans left the board meeting room while Democrats laid out their objections to the document, but returned to defeat a Democratic effort to delay action on the proposal until July. One Republican, Bob Craig of Lubbock, supported the delay motion.

Board member Geraldine Miller, R-Dallas, was absent for both votes, on postponement and then final adoption.

Democratic lawmakers and other critics have suggested that when a new board of education takes office in January - after two social conservatives have been replaced by more moderate members - the board should reconsider the standards and make substantial changes.

Asked about that possibility, McLeroy said there is nothing to prohibit such a move, but he contended that "when people look at what we've done, they won't find much to change."

Most experts say it is unlikely that the board will revisit the social studies curriculum - unless Democrat Bill White wins the governor's race this fall. If that happened, White would appoint the education board chairman, who controls the panel's agenda and could put the issue back before the board next year.

Change would be unlikely if Gov. Rick Perry wins re-election. The last two board chairs appointed by Perry were part of the social conservative bloc - McLeroy and current Chairwoman Gail Lowe - who strongly support the new social studies requirements.

In addition, state Education Commissioner Robert Scott warned against further delays since the new standards are scheduled to be phased in to classroom instruction in the 2011-12 school year.

Board member Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, another social conservative, opened Friday's board meeting with an invocation that referred to the U.S. and its history as a "Christian land governed by Christian principles."

"I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have from the beginning been our guiding geniuses," she said.

Before approving the standards on Friday, board members adopted scores of additional changes - including the restoration of Thomas Jefferson's name to a list of political philosophers that students will study in world history. Board members had come under criticism for removing Jefferson's name earlier this year though they pointed out that Jefferson would still be studied in other areas of the curriculum such as U.S. history and government.

Board members also adopted a standard that calls on high school students to "compare and contrast" the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment - barring establishment of a state religion - with the legal doctrine of church-state separation that emerged from U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

"We need to have students compare and contrast this current view of separation of church and state with the actual language in the First Amendment," said McLeroy, who like other social conservatives contends that separation of church and state was established in the law only by activist judges and not by the Constitution or Bill of Rights.

Knight led opposition to the proposal, saying it "implies there is no such thing as the legal doctrine of separation of church and state" despite numerous rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts that have firmly linked the requirement to the First Amendment.

The curriculum standards adopted by the GOP majority have a definite political and philosophical bent in many areas. For example, high school students will have to learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s in U.S. history - but not about liberal or minority rights groups that are identified as such.

Board members also gave a thumbs down to requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage in the curriculum. In addition, the requirements place Sen. Joseph McCarthy in a more positive light in U.S. history despite the view of most historians who condemn the late Republican senator's tactics and his view that the U.S. government was infiltrated by Communists in the 1950s.