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’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
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These same publishers sell college level textbooks. There are probably more textbooks sold by these publishers at a college level than at a grade and high school level. As college professors, scientists, researchers and college students, we should have a greater influence on the publishers than 11 idiots in Texas. We really need a list of all the textbook publishers who give in and rewrite history and promote anti-scientific ideas and boycott them.
Holy shit. Revisionist history now? We *really* have to move towards electronic book made up by experts in their fields and forget about the publishers. Remember, the publishers have one thing and one thing only in mind: MONEY. Texas has a lot of it set aside for books and the cuckoos figured out over 30 years ago that they can use that to their advantage by pushing shit in Texas schools and other states will more or less be forced to use the same shitty books. Here’s another clue: the other states should declare a moratorium on buying new books – the only problem with that is how do you replace the numerous damaged books … Anyway, a broad moratorium by most other states would send the publishers an economic signal saying “we don’t want your shit”.
I kinda sympathize with Dr. Leroy motivation, though – it’s a matter of adding balance. Since reality has a well-known liberal bias, we should balance that with a conservative bias in the history books – think of it as a kind of consolation prize. (Seriously, though, I’d wish they’d one day realize the reason for the lack of “great conservatives” in history books: with a century or more of hindsight, “managed to delay inevitable progress by twenty years” usually doesn’t appear as that much of an achievement anymore.)
At the end of the day, I think the publishers should try to submit unchanged text books and just claim they made the required changes. I highly doubt any of the Republican members of the Texas BOE can actually read, so they’ll likely never notice.
That drastic and damaging changes like this are labeled with the sensible-sounding word, conservative, continues to baffle me. Wouldn’t it be more conservative to not want to change the existing textbooks? Wouldn’t it be more conservative to keep social studies textbooks focused more on facts and less on ideology and a mythologizing patriotism? But the US political meaning of conservative is different from the standard, non-political adjective meaning, I guess.