By William La Jeunesse & Lindsay Stewart<\/p>\n
What do liberal lawmakers in California share with their conservative counterparts in Texas? Very little. But this week both are watching the 15 member Texas State Board of Education, which will chose the next generation of history textbooks for most American children.<\/p>\n
The left-right culture war will play out over the choice of words, photos, who to honor and what events in American and world history should receive a few lines of text. It may sound innocent, when it is anything but.<\/p>\n
Years of research, months of editing, hundreds of hours of debate will be boiled down into a single document \u2013 a statement of curricula \u2013 that will define the parameters followed by virtually every social studies textbook and test for students from kindergarten to thru 8th grade for the next decade.<\/p>\n
The battle lines are drawn. On one side are conservatives, who contend academia has been hijacked by liberals. A point supported by studies that show 90 percent\u00a0of humanities teachers identify themselves as Democrats.<\/p>\n
And nowhere is their bias more visible than the one-sided treatment of American history in U.S. textbooks, where words like \u2018man\u2019 and \u2018mankind\u2019 have been stricken, \u2018Founding Fathers\u2019 has been replaced by \u2018Framers\u2019 and \u2018Founders\u2019 and racial quota\u2019s are applied to the number of photos used in any one book.<\/p>\n
\u201c The liberal extreme groups aren\u2019t interested in balance.\u00a0 They want the standards one-sided, that only fits them,\u201d says Jonathan Saenz of the right leaning Liberty Institute. \u201cThe other side\u2019s not interested in the truth. And the reality is, they have this mission of distortion and confusion because they have a political agenda.\u00a0 And they\u2019re not really interested in the content.\u00a0 They\u2019re interested in changing the political demographics.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the last two years the board, composed of 10 Republicans and 5 Democrats, has been led by 7 influential social conservatives. By the end of this week, the board will have finished rewriting curriculum standards for three key subject areas \u2013 English, science and now, social studies.<\/p>\n
Liberals contend the board is out of touch and the block of social conservatives have manipulated the process to reflect teachings out of the mainstream.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey have politicized the textbook process.\u00a0 And I think that our schoolchildren deserve better than politicizing it,\u201d Terri Burke, Texas ACLU Executive Director . \u201cWe really believe this curriculum should be turned over to experts who know something about history, about education, about the learning levels of schoolchildren. We ought have people who really know it being the ones who write it and vet it and tell us that this is what kiddos oughta learn.\u201d<\/p>\n
In California, a key state Senate Committee passed a bill Tuesday designed to prohibit any textbook approved in Texas to be used in the Golden State.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years, California should not be subject to their backward curriculum changes,\u201d said Leland Yee, D-San Francisco.\u00a0 \u201cThe alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation\u2019s diverse history.\u00a0 Our kids should be provided an education based on facts and that embraces our multicultural nation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By William La Jeunesse & Lindsay Stewart What do liberal lawmakers in California share with their conservative counterparts in Texas? Very little. But this week both are watching the 15 member Texas State Board of Education, which will chose the next generation of history textbooks for most American children. The left-right culture war will play […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5027,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569511","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\/5027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}