{"id":424668,"date":"2010-03-13T11:52:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T16:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16711557.post-2411860481190396168"},"modified":"2010-03-13T11:52:58","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T16:52:58","slug":"texas-conservatives-racists-win-curriculum-changes-that-promote-thesuperiority-of-u-s-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/424668","title":{"rendered":"Texas Conservatives, Racists Win Curriculum Changes That Promote the\nSuperiority of U.S. Capitalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Mary Helen Berlanga of the Texas School Board accuses conservatives of rewritting history. They have agreed to textbook changes that promotes the superioritiy of whites and the capitalist system.<\/a>
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

March 12, 2010<\/p>\n

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change<\/p>\n

By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
New York Times<\/p>\n

AUSTIN, Tex. \u2014 After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers\u2019 commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.<\/p>\n

The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.<\/p>\n

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.<\/p>\n

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are adding balance,\u201d said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. \u201cHistory has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.<\/p>\n

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state\u2019s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, \u201cThey can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.<\/p>\n

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board\u2019s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others \u2014 one Democrat and one conservative Republican \u2014 announced they were not seeking re-election.<\/p>\n

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.<\/p>\n

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.<\/p>\n

\u201cI reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,\u201d said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. \u201cI have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.\u201d<\/p>\n

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about \u201cthe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.<\/p>\n

\u201cRepublicans need a little credit for that,\u201d he said. \u201cI think it\u2019s going to surprise some students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study \u201cthe unintended consequences\u201d of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.<\/p>\n

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include \u201chow the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.\u201d The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.<\/p>\n

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons \u201cthe founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was defeated on a party-line vote.<\/p>\n

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, \u201cThe social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word \u201ccapitalism\u201d throughout their texts with the \u201cfree-enterprise system.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,\u201d said one conservative member, Terri Leo. \u201cYou know, \u2018capitalist pig!\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of \u201cthe importance of personal responsibility for life choices\u201d in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,\u201d Ms. Cargill said.<\/p>\n

Even the course on world history did not escape the board\u2019s scalpel.<\/p>\n

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term \u201cseparation between church and state.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,\u201d Ms. Dunbar said.
<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mary Helen Berlanga of the Texas School Board accuses conservatives of rewritting history. They have agreed to textbook changes that promotes the superioritiy of whites and the capitalist system.Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos March 12, 2010 Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.New York Times AUSTIN, Tex. \u2014 After […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-424668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}