Texas school textbooks curriculum arouses anger among leftists, liberals
The Texas State Board of Education approved recently a new social studies curriculum that has angered leftists and liberals.
The new standards came into consideration after the board appointed a panel of experts last year to make recommendations. The 15-member board voted 9-5 in favor of the new standards for textbooks and teaching history, economics and other civics classes that will take effect in August 2011.
The new curriculum will teach free market principles, explain how government taxation and regulation can restrict private enterprise, emphasize the achievements of Republican leaders such as President Ronald Reagan, and lend more focus on the biblical and Christian traditions of the country’s founding fathers, among others.
Other changes: The U.S. government will be called a “Constitutional Republic” rather than a “Democratic society.” There will also be a “Celebrate Freedom Week” where Texas students learn the importance of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
Critics charge that the standards are a blatant attempt to insert an ideological and political agenda into Texas classrooms. Among the readers’ comments to the article posted on ABC News, one person compared the board members to the Taliban “by imposing their distorted beliefs on the majority.”
However in Nightline’s Daily line, another reader’s comment said, “At last a state that has the guts to teach their children the true history of this country. Way to go, Texas!”
The curriculum has earned controversy because Texas has 4.7 million public school students. As a result, textbook publishers often tailor their curriculum according that of the Lone Star state.
Board member Don McLeroy said, “It’s imperative that our children be taught the original direction of our country. All we’re doing is …completing the story. We’re restoring the balance,” he said.
When Board member McLeroy said, “It’s imperative that our children be taught the original direction of our country..” He means HIS VERSION of the original direction because his imagination is history to him. People came from Europe to leave Religious Persecution behind, so they brought their own Religions, practiced them here and began PERSECUTING those who didn’t obey their religion!!!
The original direction of America was unique: one Government in the world that did not contain religion, and that is what made the country prosper.
Remember Thomas Paine, the pamphleteer who wrote “The Rights of Man”..he also wrote “The Age of Reason”. Read the first 12 pages and you’ll see what he thought of the Christian Religion, as did so many other founding fathers. Lincoln had no religion which is why he was so competent.
McLeroy says: we’re…completing the story. We’re restoring the balance,” he said. McLeroy has never read “The Age of Reason” because it doesn’t fit in with his fascist leanings.
The last Christian Nation to integrate Church and State was Nazi Germany. McLeroy has never read contemporary history either. McLeroy quotes history the way he would have liked it, not the way it was.
I don’t understand why it’s so hard for these nitwits to understand that public school is where children go to be educated, not to hear fairy tales that masquerade as truth. They are there to learn the skills that will be needed in order for them to succeed as adults. I don’t care if they are offered (but not indoctrinated with) political points of view or opinions they may not be familliar with, but keep superstition out of the classroom! If you want your kids to learn about an angry diety that floods the whole earth (children included) because he’s kind of moody, beings with halos and gossamer wings that flutter about heaven and earth, and a mysterious man-god that dies on a cross and is re-animated a few days later, send them to Sunday school. Why should my tax dollars go towards teaching such nonsense? You wouldn’t teach softball in an ice hockey rink, why teach church in school?
To Jon Becker: You commented – Lincoln had no religion which is why he was so competent. -
I found this interesting tidbit to add to your “enlightened” post-
On March 30, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation expressing the idea “that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins”, and designated the day of April 30, 1863 as a day of “national humiliation, fasting and prayer” in the hope that God would respond by restoring “our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace”. He went on to say, “…it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. You can find part of this here:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fast.htm
and: Journal of the Senate – March 2, 1863 and here: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 – 1875, The Library of Congress
I could add more Christian writings from our founding fathers…but you get the idea..right?
To Jon Becker: You commented – Lincoln had no religion which is why he was so competent. -
I found this interesting tidbit to add to your “enlightened” post-
On March 30, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation expressing the idea “that the awful calamity of civil war, which now desolates the land, may be but a punishment, inflicted upon us, for our presumptuous sins”, and designated the day of April 30, 1863 as a day of “national humiliation, fasting and prayer” in the hope that God would respond by restoring “our now divided and suffering Country, to its former happy condition of unity and peace”. He went on to say, “…it is the duty of nations as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon; and to recognize the sublime truth, announced in the Holy Scriptures and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord. You can find part of this here:
http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fast.htm
and: Journal of the Senate – March 2, 1863 and here: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774 – 1875, The Library of Congress
I could add more Christian writings from our founding fathers…but you get the idea..right?
Looks like a couple more leftists/liberals are angered by this decision. I personally would have been glad to hear about it when I was going to public school in Texas. “Completing the story” and “restoring the balance” I think is a good way of characterizing it, but I also think it’s just a start; a very good one! Next stop, emphasis that evolution is a theory… and there are other theories as well, maybe even mention intelligent design…