January 13, 2020 By: El Jefe Category: Alternative Facts
The NY Times did a study of eight states’ US history textbooks including Texas, and it ain’t pretty. Printed by the same publisher, the books differ in discussions of race, slavery, the Civil War, sexuality, and gun rights. And if you guessed that Texas tilted the texts to far right ideology, you would be correct.
Enlightening (and depressing) read.
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My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
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A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
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The Texas textbook commission has been fucking things up for the rest of the US for at least fifty years. Not just history, either.
1The real news, which the Times missed, is that things have changed in the past 40 years and publishers are now able (or just willing) to customize texts for smaller sales targets so that Texas’s assault on common sense no longer has to infect the children in other states.
The publishers always had the capacity to customize. When I was in Catholic high school 60 years ago our US history text was a standard one but with cut-ins mentioning Catholic contributions to America. That’s how I learned about the important philosopher that you Baptists never heard of, Orestes Brownson.
This sort of thing has been going on since the invention of movable type. In Victorian texts in England you could tell whether the author was pro-German by whether he spelled the duchy Schleswig, Slesvig or (if neutral) Sleswick. Ditto with Alsace or Elsass.
2Years ago when I was in K-12, our books were so old they smelled like mothballs. School districts did not have the $$ to buy new, improved models. The last world war I read about in those books was Number One. I simply took myself to the public library where I managed to fill the holes in my learning. Question: does this same commission control the books in the public libraries of Texas?
3I noticed the California textbook committee was all educators while the Texas committee included numerous non-educators including a pastor and politician.
I guess we should be glad the Gablers finally quit running the selection process to put their perverted form of religion in.
4History textbooks have always sucked. Boil the Peloponnesian Wars into a paragraph. Discuss. Reduce the American Civil War to a chapter. Discuss. That sucks. But deliberately adding lies and twisted religion demands some jail time for Neil Bush and the likes of him. Pay attention to your local school board elections and vote.
What should really frighten the socks off any teacher and parents are the wingnut demands for science courses where right and wrong answers once ruled to include the crazy as a correct answer.
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