Monday, March 8, 2010
Protect Social Studies education in Texas
Note: This advisory is courtesy of Texan Candace King and Americans United for Separation of Church and State. We join Candace in urging all to tell the SBOE to support sound curriculum standards. You can contact the board here: http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/tea/contact.html If you have children attending Hays County public schools, you might also want to ask for the views of their teachers, administrators and school board trustees.
See the TEKS for social studies, as currently written, at this link: http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter113/index.html
As you likely know, Texas remains at the center of the classroom culture wars, as the State Board of Education (SBOE) again takes up consideration of the social studies TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) curriculum standards. Along with many Texans and educational experts from around the country, Americans United has significant concerns over the inclusion of religiously motivated content in the curriculum standards.
This week, the Board will resume its revision of the social studies TEKS and vote on amendments to the curriculum. This is a crucial time to ensure that no politically motivated, historically inaccurate, or inappropriately religious content makes its way into the TEKS.
The State Board of Education represents the people of Texas - so they need to hear from you! Send a letter to the Board asking that they include only those changes to the TEKS that are pedagogically appropriate and historically accurate.
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5 comments:
An endless battle of wits against half-wits.
May as well also get out the white sheets hanging in the closets.
Apparently Science is wrong. Stupidity is contagious.
These people are lucky that stupidity isn't a crime, but meanwhile, the rest of us continue to be forced with the constant barrage of ignorant, willful and pseudo-religious people pushing their bizarre beliefs and focus of twisted history down everyone else's throats.
Such idiots and such an endless battle over absurdities. Such a wast of dollars that could be put to better use.
Up is down. Night is day. The earth is about 2,000 years old and humans lived among the dinosaurs. Furthermore, Caesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan and Gloria Steinim didn't exist but Phyllis Schlafley, Rush Limbaugh and and Jerry Falwell are American heroes. I wonder if this long national nightmare perpetuated by the Christian right will burn itself out in my lifetime. Doubt that. Liklihood is I'm just going to die a tormented angry angry man.
Those "pseudo-religious half-wits" have gotten themselves in a powerful position to influence education way beyond what should be their right. So what is the answer?
Complacency is certainly not good and a cosmic democratic passivity just lets the problem get worse because these ultraconservative activists are out there getting elected and making changes to education policy that will last at least a generation.
So when our next generation of kids go around talking about humans riding on dinosaurs at Flintstone-like theme parks and that homosapiens were designed and created by some narcissistic invisible converted Jew in the sky, we may want to consider revisiting our textbooks facts.
What else are we possible going to learn from the new textbooks?
That Cesar Chavez was a chain of Mexican restaurants that went bust because they hired union workers?
That Sam Walton was the second coming of Christ but we missed it because Bill Clinton was President and Hillary took all our energy so we could fight her effort to force socialist health care on the nation?
That Ronald Reagan was the greatest President ever because he stopped the global march of the genocidal communist Sandinistas by duping Iran with the clever and profitable free market sale of poorly made weapons that no one but the dumb Arabs would want?
That the US tried desperately and unsuccessfully to stop Saddam Hussein from using chemical weapons on the Iraqi Kurds in the 1980s because Saddam got the nerve gas from Dow Chemical under a secret US government contract that was clearly the result of the liberal and sneaky Jimmy Carter presidency years before.
That Barack Obama was our first Afro-American President but he failed to unite the country because he tried to install reverse racist socialist policies in an already weakening economy caused by years of liberal affirmative action hiring? The ethnically diverse Republican Party did, however, commend him for his basketball and preaching skills.
(For all you evangelical Christians out there: I know you will assume the above textbook revisions are true - but they never really happened - YET)
Mr. Roundup Editor, get someone in the know to write a specific expose on the SBOE Jesus Squad so we all know what department of the Oral Roberts Junior College these folks graduated from.
Let me leave you with an appropriate but adapted funny:
"The head of the SBOE was asked by a reporter what he though about the need for bilingual education in Texas.
He replied: 'I don't think we need it. If English was good enough for Jesus Christ it's good enough for our kids'."
Ralph,
There's an old Ida Cox Blues Song called, "When You Lose Your Money, Don't Lose Your Mind."
Sounds like it's too late for you to worry. lol
The only thing to do is to fight them all. Try to vote them out when they run for public office if they're trying to push their views through the office.
Unfortunately, these folks appear to be the majority throughout Texas and the South.
As AE said: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same results. And that is exactly what the voting process is.
We need to get the voucher system approved in Texas so the more intelligent, highly developed apes can set up schools of their own to educate their kids with cognitive integrity and reason while at the same time promoting self-esteem and the joy of learning in our children.
The Texas public schools, following the lead of the evangelical conservatives on the SBOE, are being turned into armed security camps and propaganda institutes of Confederate and Republican Party revisionist history clamoring for the good ol' days.
Sure, I'm exaggerating (a bit), but that is where things are headed with the public schools (charter schools are sometimes the exception). The entire model of public school competition must change.
Yes, I know. The more objective and liberal of the professional educators will say that public education is sacred and the voucher system will only give evangelical conservatives more fodder for private education profiteering at the expense of our children - and they are right, it will. But at least it will be their children, not ours.
So let's have a long-term competition experiment of private education philosophies - Liberal: broad, cooperative, evolution-based, peace-focused, pan-religious, and multicultural vs. Christian conservative: creation theory, nationalistic, rote memorization, the three rrr's, corporal punishment, competitive sports and cheerleaders - and see who wins in the long run.
As a "win" gauge of educational success, in twenty years we will compare:
1) job satisfaction, 2) debt levels, 3) ability to speak more than one language, 4) world travel, 5) community service volunteerism, 6) number of advanced degrees, 7) number of marital divorces, 8) IQ levels, 9) number of books read each month, and 10) annual median income, to list a few.
Now I know there are other criterion that many of us would use, but you get the idea.
But you evangelical conservatives don't have to worry; we will accept your children with open arms later on when you see that what you thought was right about education isn't working. That is who liberals are: We want everyone to prosper and be free, not just those who believe our beliefs and make money.
In the end, teaching less than more is a sure sign of education failing.
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