Texas to rewrite United States history with autocrat propaganda

[Henri_Freundlich]

Excerpts from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/texas-schools-rewrites-us-history

Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favoured separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the "significant contributions" of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the civil war.

The [Texas] education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the more innocuous "Atlantic triangular trade", and recasts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as driven by Islamic fundamentalism.

"There is a battle for the soul of education," said Mavis Knight, a liberal member of the Texas education board. "They're trying to indoctrinate with American exceptionalism, the Christian founding of this country, the free enterprise system. There are strands where the free enterprise system fits appropriately but they have stretched the concept of the free enterprise system back to medieval times.

In the past four years, Christian conservatives have won almost half the seats on the Texas education board and can rely on other Republicans for support on most issues. They previously tried to require science teachers to address the "strengths and weaknesses" in the theory of evolution – a move critics regard as a back door to teaching creationism – but failed. They have had more success in tackling history and social studies.

History students are now to be required to study documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, which instil the idea of America being founded as a Christian fundamentalist nation.

Knight and others do not question that religion was an important force in American history but they fear that it is being used as a Trojan horse by evangelists to insert religious indoctrination into the school curriculum. They point to the wording of amendments such as that requiring students to "describe how religion and virtue contributed to the growth of representative government in the American colonies".

Essentially, the state of Texas wants to indoctrinate all young children with pro-Conservative, autocrat messages, while stripping out liberal viewpoints.

Why aren't Texas Parents and Residents speaking out against this biased rewrite of history? Children should be given balanced facts - from both sides - to ensure that they have the capability to make the *right* choices for themselves.

Do Texas parents want their children (and others) to become mindless drones? Or do they want their children to be able to differentiate between what's right and what's wrong (correctly) by themselves?

Believing in (or blaming) God in this modern age isn't going to help solve the challenges that children; the nation; the world is set to face.