Texas steers ‘right’

R. Lee Ermey hilariously postulated what came from Texas besides steers in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

Today, though, something else from Texas has been in the news — a much-needed reaction against the trend toward liberal indoctrination in public school textbooks. The New York Times’ James McKinley reported last week, “The Texas school board was (…) holding hearings on changes to its social studies curriculum that would portray conservatives in a more positive light, emphasize the role of Christianity in American history and include Republican political philosophies in textbooks.”

The Houston Chronicle’s Gary Scherrer wrote, “The State Board of Education tentatively approved new standards for social studies Friday with members divided along party lines — some blasting them as a fraud and conservative whitewash, others praising them as a tribute to the Founding Fathers that rightly portrays America as an exceptional country.”

Of course, denial of America as an exceptional country is a hallmark of modern liberalism. The left feels guilty that, despite its imperfections, the United States stands light-years above other nations in terms of freedom and opportunity for self-advancement. They degrade our Founding Fathers as little more than land-owning slave masters, while saying little, if anything, about the slavery that still exists in parts of Africa and the Middle East.

The conservatives in Texas simply asked — rightly so — why programs like the Great Society that led to skyrocketing crime, illegitimacy and dependence on government are hailed as a red-letter milestone in America’s history while the right’s efforts to control the size of our bloated federal government are either marginalized or cast as an attack by the rich on the poor.

Isn’t it great when liberals accuse conservatives of “fear-mongering,” yet half their foundation rests upon convincing voters that Republicans are in bed with moneyed interests and out to drain the poor of their last dime?

It’s not that they want to lower taxes in order to help businesses expand and create jobs; the little Karls of the world simply refuse to grasp basic economics, for some reason.

This Texas case is nothing new. An entry on Conservapedia, complete with relevant citations, says: “Textbooks used in schools of all ages have also been exposed as promoting a decidedly liberal bias against the nation of Israel. A landmark book called The Trouble with Textbooks, by Dr. Gary A. Tobin and Dennis R. Ybarra described results of a comprehensive study they conducted of the 28 most widely used Social Studies textbooks in the United States. The researchers found that U.S. textbooks often contain ‘repeated misrepresentations that cross the line into bigotry.’ Examples included Jesus being called a Palestinian, Islam being ‘treated with a devotional tone in some textbooks, less detached and analytical than it ought to be. Muslim beliefs are described in several instances as fact, without any clear qualifier such as Muslims believe…’ The Islamic empire of the Middle Ages was presented as ‘a time of unqualified glory without blemishes,’ while various aspects of the wars of Arab states against Israel were misrepresented. (In) the glossary of one book, World History: Continuity and Change, the entry on the Ten Commandments skeptically describes them as ‘Moral laws Moses claimed to have received from the Hebrew G-d Y-hweh on Mount Sinai,’ while the very same glossary states the Qu’ran is a ‘Holy Book of Islam containing revelations received by Muhammad from G-d.’”

One textbook publisher, Teachers Curriculum Institute, has agreed to rewrite its unit on the Middle East after being challenged and consulting many scholars.

The San Fransisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council found that the textbooks were so filled with inaccuracies and bias that they should not be used.

Professor Larry Schweikart noted that most textbooks tend to come from New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia, all liberal bastions. As concerns American history, Schweikart sees the “Reagan test” as a consistent indicator of whether a book is politically slanted. The majority of books he has examined credit former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev with ending the Cold War, while marginalizing Reagan.

One need not make an extensive case study of books like Queering Elementary Education to realize that there has been, for some time, a leftist agenda among many educators, textbook authors and publishers.

Somewhere along the line, academia lost sight of the fact that the job of a public school teacher is to equip his or her students with the necessary skills to be functional, self-sufficient, productive members of society. How to read and write, to develop a fair amount of proficiency in mathematics, an appreciation for genuine science and an understanding of American history, the Constitution and our system of government — these are the things that most of us want for our kids when they go to school.

I’d say it’s a safe bet that — even outside of Texas — most parents aren’t too concerned with whether or not their kids can parrot ACLU Marxists in empty denunciations of their country.

American students’ performance in math and science has plummeted relative to other countries over the years, probably in part due to other countries’ teachers not being fixated on leftist indoctrination strategies and actually doing their jobs.

This decision in Texas is cause for an optimistic appraisal of the state of affairs in American education. In a time in which the left is making one shamble after another in Washington, and people are becoming ever more discontented with them, it seems a less-than-prudent time for aging hippies to continue using the public schools as a venue to spew their long-discredited baloney.