Tacky Women
In an attempt to “streamline” the Texas social studies curriculum, the Texas State Board of Education decided to cut some people from Texas history. Namely, Hillary Clinton and Helen Keller.
Members of the volunteer work group that made such recommendations to the board said the state requires children to learn about too many historical figures.
Clinton, as the first presidential nominee of ether major party to have ta-tas and the largest vote getter of the 2016 election, has been taught to high schoolers. Helen Keller was taught to third graders as an example that handicapped people have made great contributions to society.
Neither statement is true now in Texas, so these women hit the trash can. Besides, that Keller woman was a socialist.
In what reality can you learn too much about historical figures? Does learning too much turn you into a Democrat or some damn thing?
Texas ranks 43rd in education among the states because – obviously – we are teaching too damn much.
Thanks to everybody for the heads up.
Texas education, as you say, already ranks 43rd out of the 50 states. Why is the Texas State Board of Education working to make Texas’s children even less well educated? What do they have against kids? Or women?
1Gosh, I hope they’ll still revere Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame. She was born in Rowena, just east of San Angelo, ya know.
2Thank you, JJ, for the article on Helen Keller. I’d read that she became a socialist after finding out that she was able to communicate and learn only because her parents had enough money to hire a private tutor for her, and most children in her condition would have been sent to an institution or worse. The article filled in the story.
We all learned about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan and the “water” breakthrough, but they never told us about the socialism. Now in Texas they’re afraid to even mention her name? Even with just the whitewashed version, I think kids ought to know that a blind and deaf woman can graduate from one of the top universities in the country.
3And these TSBE ‘work group’ cretins are setting standards for the rest of the nation too, as textbook publishers cater to the Texass skoolbook market. They craft the skoolbooks for Texas because it’s their largest customer, then simply present them to the other states’ school districts as what’s available. Y’all in other states ought to be getting real PO’ed about this too.
4Texass, giving new meaning to the word ‘pacesetter’ in it’s rush to the bottom.
@ That Other Jean:
5Maybe it’s not children and women they hate but education. After all — obviously it’s a liberal thing. People who get edjumacated turn Democrat. And they can’t allow THAT. Voting in one’s own interest is dangerous to the status quo of corporations right to rule.
I’m speechless! I live near Tuscumbia, Alabama, birthplace of Helen Keller where the hospital and library are named after her, The Miracle Worker is staged every summer and her home, Ivy Green is visited by people from all over the world. Miss. Keller is buried in the National Cathedral in Washington DC.
6Can someone check to see if Laura or Barbara Bush is still on the list? Nancy Reagan? Ann Coulter?
7I’m surprised they haven’t taken Sam Houston out of the books, since he was against joining the confederacy.
8And yet, Texas has 180 Confederate Civil War statues and monuments, the second most in the nation.
But sure, the story of Helen Keller, that’s too much for students to hear about in the classroom. Sometimes you wonder who’s really blind to the world around them. The way members of the Texas State Board of Education make their way through classroom curriculum isn’t a story students or anyone else would find inspirational, simply mystifying.
https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/21/texas-has-second-most-public-symbols-confederacy-nation/
9It’s one thing that Keller was a “socialist”, but I have also read that her family was rabidly racist. I am surprised that this learned board didn’t issue the seal of approval rat thar.
10How is Texas the biggest market for schoolbooks? Shouldn’t that be California?
11Mark Twain had it right:
12“First God made idiots, that was for practice. Then He made school boards.”
The burning question – what the hell is wrong with Texas citizens?
13Why didn’t they just ban school books and be done with it?
14…or just issue blank journals instead. That way, they could send a script down to the schools and have the kids write their own.
15Hating on Hillary is a growth industry, I get that, but Helen Keller? Good grief. Who else will Texas kids be protected from — Jane Addams (double-plus socialist!), Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Jacqueline Cochran, Susan B. Anthony, Geraldine Ferraro, Sally Ride, Babe Didriksen, Fannie Lou Hamer…ANN RICHARDS?
Some of y’all need to leave the beauty parlor and go volunteer for this “work group.”
16Rhea,
Texas may have an outsized influence on textbooks because the specification of them is centralized in the TSBE for all districts in the state. In other states maybe each district or ? does the selection process, don’t know how it works in CA.
It’s been covered in many places, here included (JJ’s salon) in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook#K-12_textbooks
A Wiki about the infamous Gablers has this to say about it, since the TSBE Textbook Selection Cmte chooses books for -all- school districts. Some states actually prohibit the state level government from selecting books or curricula. The state, TX, that rants the most about “local control” does the most to inhibit it, fancy that.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_Research_Analysts
17“The Texas State Board of Education wields enormous influence upon the choice of textbooks used across America, because Texas, as a large and populous state, requires many textbooks, and both publishers and smaller states can save much-needed operating costs or education funds by simply using the Texas version of a given text.”
Well, now we know who’s going to lose when they play Trivial Pursuit.
18I just got back from a one day program on counseling and I am about ready to completely disremember what I learned! Not one male is on that damn list? How many times do the Gablers have to be sued before they just dry up and blow away?
19Well at least the Texas School Board isn’t political.
20Doesn’t Dubya “Is Our Children Learning?” Bush have a brother Neil whose chief hustle is textbooks?
21I read part of a Molly Ivins book a few years ago that said the Bushes have been friends with 1 of the textbook-publishing families for generations, and guess which family just happened to get the contract to develop and publish all the test materials when Dunya got No Child Left Behind accepted in Texas…
I guess that tag line is at least partly right: if you’re 43Rd or so in the nation, you’ve pretty well left them all in the sewer.
22Meanwhile in AZ, https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/creationist-helped-review-arizona-evolution-curriculum-10820376
I’m beginning to feel some sympathy for these guys. http://newenglandindependence.weebly.com/
23Evil. Pure evil.
24First time posting anything here but I just wanted to say that I love this site! I have spent an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through the archives and laughing my head off. Keep up the good work, JJ!
25@lazrgrl –
Yep theyre that stupid in Phoenix. I’ll be sooo glad when I can leave this half-baked state.
26Let me get this straight. Texas finishes 43rd in over all test results after they get to pick the textbooks for most of the field? I begin to understand how Gohmert gets re-elected.
27Betsy DeVos will be proud. After all, too much education is toxic to conservatism and fundamentalism, right?
28No worries. Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in school, we never made it past WW2 in the textbook anyway.
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