The Texas School Book Repository
on April 1, 2010 1:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (152)
Do the schoolbook publishers of America have standards? Courage? Ethics? In what sense do they stand behind their product? For "product" they sometimes produce, and not textbooks in the traditional sense. I ask these questions for a reason.
Right-wingers from Texas will be deciding what will be added and taken out of the textbooks of America’s school children. They form the majority of the 15-member Texas State Board of Education. They believe current textbooks are slanted toward a liberal viewpoint, and that discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which one member describes as "hooey," wrongly excludes a consideration of Creationism.
"Teaching the controversy" about Evolution versus Creationism is of course the Wedge Strategy of the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design publicity organization in Seattle. Having failed in the courts to get Creationism into schools as a legitimate area of science, they created a "controversy" about the most thoroughly confirmed theory in the history of science. Now the Texas Schoolbookers are using the strategy to make openings for other political beliefs dear to the Right.
Well, what’s wrong with that? Left and Right work together to create American history, after all, in the open marketplace of ideas. True. But how do you feel about Ralph Nader being taken out history books and Newt Gingrich being added? The Confederacy seen in more positive terms? Or that the Texas board’s review panel doubts that such "minority figures" as Cesar Chavez, Justice Thurgood Marshall and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. need to be included.
Do the schoolbook publishers of America have standards? Courage? Ethics? In what sense do they stand behind their product? For "product" they sometimes produce, and not textbooks in the traditional sense. I ask these questions for a reason.
Right-wingers from Texas will be deciding what will be added and taken out of the textbooks of America’s school children. They form the majority of the 15-member Texas State Board of Education. They believe current textbooks are slanted toward a liberal viewpoint, and that discussion of Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, which one member describes as "hooey," wrongly excludes a consideration of Creationism.
"Teaching the controversy" about Evolution versus Creationism is of course the Wedge Strategy of the Discovery Institute, an Intelligent Design publicity organization in Seattle. Having failed in the courts to get Creationism into schools as a legitimate area of science, they created a "controversy" about the most thoroughly confirmed theory in the history of science. Now the Texas Schoolbookers are using the strategy to make openings for other political beliefs dear to the Right.
Well, what’s wrong with that? Left and Right work together to create American history, after all, in the open marketplace of ideas. True. But how do you feel about Ralph Nader being taken out history books and Newt Gingrich being added? The Confederacy seen in more positive terms? Or that the Texas board’s review panel doubts that such "minority figures" as Cesar Chavez, Justice Thurgood Marshall and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. need to be included.