Leaders on the Texas Board of Education are changing history as it has been written and taught. We are all descendants of history, and to have it re-written and re-taught angers and saddens me. I have included a few of the changes further down in this post beginning with Martin Luther King. MLK is a huge part of history and I'm one who remembers the news showing firehoses being used on people considered second class citizens. People who were descriminated against because of the color of their skin. No one should be suprised about the "whiteness" or "straightness" of the leaders of the board who are making these changes. People who have no idea what it would have been like to be forced to ride in the back of the bus, much less having a cross burned on their lawn, or a relative hanged because he whistled at a white woman. Regardless of these "leaders" views, these events were real, and we cannot forget such acts or how our history is steeped in the blood of these people.
These "leaders" want our children to learn about people such as Phyllis Schlafly. How many of you know about this lady? Well she coined the phrase "a woman's place is in the kitchen" and she faught adamently against any law for marital rape. Oh yeah, this is the message we should send to our young women of today, stay in the kitchen and never deny your husband sex.
They also want to infuse the doctrine of the NRA into our children's minds, like the majority of the backwoods people of Texas don't already put a gun into the hands of their boy children when they first start walking.
How do these changes make us look to the rest of the nation and to the world for that matter? It makes us look exactly like what these school board leaders are, "close minded". Unfortunately it lumps the rest of us who live here with them, we just have to let the rest of the country and world know we all do not agree with such thought.
The majority of the Texas Board of Education are white Conservatist. There is nothing wrong with being a Conservative or supporter of that philosophy, just as there is nothing wrong with being a Liberal. The danger comes when you want to insist on your idea's and personal beliefs being taught exclusively rather than with a balance, thus allowing young mind's being able to think and form an individual opinion. To teach so exclusively tend's to be a process of brain washing and in the long run be detrimental to our society.
Below are some of the changes:
A ban on teaching anything about the holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in Grade One. Instead, teachers must instruct children about Veterans Day.
A ban on the teaching of a unit about Harriet Tubman. It was replaced with one on Clara Barton.
The removal of specific units about the struggle for civil rights by women and minorities, with one TBE member noting that women and minorities owed thanks to men from the majority (e.g., white men) for their rights. The board was forced at another meeting to back down in part from this decision.
Required teaching of the McCarthy era as a part of the “fight against the communist infiltration of the U.S. government” in the 1950s and 1960s. One TBE member insisted that the curriculum specifically teach that Joseph McCarthy’s actions had been “vindicated” by current political events.
Slavery now referred to as Atlantic Triangular Trade.
Removal of wriitings by Martin Luther King while in the Birmingham jail during the Civil Right's Movement.
Jefferson Davis's inaugural address as president of the Confederacy will now be studied alongside Abraham Lincoln's speeches.
Japanese-American internment is now juxtaposed with "the regulation of some foreign nationals," ignoring the fact that while a few Germans and Italians were imprisoned as enemy aliens, the vast majority of people of Japanese ancestry who were interned were US citizens.
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