Those Texas History Curriculum Revisions

Katherine Stewart has an article at AlterNet about the changes made to the history curriculum by the Texas Board of Education that reveal just how bad those revisions were. Some of this stuff is straight out of the David Barton jokebook:

While the handful of moderates on the SBOE squeals in opposition, the conservative majority lands blow after blow, passing resolutions imposing its mythological history on the nation?s textbooks.

Cynthia Dunbar, a board member who has described public education as a ?subtly deceptive tool of perversion,? and who homeschooled her own children, emerges as a relentless ideologue. During the hearings, she yanks Thomas Jefferson from a standard according to which students are expected to ?explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas ? on political revolutions from 1750 to the present,? and replaces him with the 13th-century theologian St Thomas Aquinas. Moderate Republican board member Bob Craig points out that the curriculum writers clearly intended for the students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson in this part of the standard, not a mix of Protestant and Catholic theologians, but the resolution passes anyway?

The board goes on to remove the word ?slavery? from the standards, replacing it with the more benign-seeming ?Atlantic triangular trade.? They insist on calling the United States a ?constitutional republic? rather than a ?democracy? ? largely because they want students to think of their country as Republican, not Democratic?

Historical figures of suspect religious views (like Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin) or political tendency (like union organizer Dolores Huerta) are ruthlessly demoted or purged altogether from the study program. Meanwhile, the board majority makes room for an eclectic array of ancillary figures from the revolutionary period, such as Charles Carroll and Jonathan Trumbull. What these marginal figures have in common, other than being dusted off from high shelves and promoted by the board, is the fact that they were loud defenders of orthodox Christianity.

And the students in Texas public schools are the ones who will be damaged by this propaganda.

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