The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

That is what a small group of conservatives feel regarding their take of the curriculum being used in Texas social studies classes.

h/t: Kim Crouch via Facebook

From dallasnews.com

AUSTIN – “Civil rights leaders César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall – whose names appear on schools, libraries, streets and parks across the U.S. – are given too much attention in Texas social studies classes, conservatives advising the state on curriculum standards say.

“To have César Chávez listed next to Ben Franklin” – as in the current standards – “is ludicrous,” wrote evangelical minister Peter Marshall, one of six experts advising the state as it develops new curriculum standards for social studies classes and textbooks. David Barton, president of Aledo-based WallBuilders, said in his review that Chávez, a Hispanic labor leader, “lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others.”

Marshall also questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure. He wrote that the late justice is “not a strong enough example” of such a figure.

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Barton, a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be ‘republican’ rather than ‘democratic.’ That means social studies books should discuss ‘republican’ values in the U.S., his report said.

Both Barton and Marshall also singled out as overrated Anne Hutchinson, a New England pioneer and early advocate of women’s rights and religious freedom, who was tried and banished from her Puritan colony in Massachusetts because of her nontraditional views.

‘She was certainly not a significant colonial leader, and didn’t accomplish anything except getting herself exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for making trouble,’ Marshall wrote.”

This is what happens when history is filtered through the lens of politics. This whole commission should be slapped down for trying form history in their image. I say, teach all of it and let the children find out for themselves who was important/not that important. Their remark regarding Thurgood Marshall itself shows this panel’s own lack of historical knowledge (“Brown vs. Board of Education” anyone? But perhaps that was not important to THEM).  As for César Chávez, he was actually against the practice of hiring undocumented workers and at times reported them. Conservatives have taken a the same stance on illegal immigration. But to this panel, his contributions were not worthy of note?

On the flip, if the curriculum was just as guilty of revising history to make it fit some PC narrative, that also needs to stop. This took place in a school district in Maryland back in 1993.

“Problems with much of the approved curriculum soon emerged, and Superintendent Edward M. Felegy suspended five social-studies guides for further review. Good thing, too: Reading them, one discovers that slaves chopped sugar cane in the American Southwest; that Croatians (instead of Croatan Indians) served as the heretofore unknown levelers of the “Lost Colony” in Roanoke, North Carolina; that the English fought the British in the American Revolution; and, according to one illustration, that colonial mothers had access to electric ranges in their kitchens.

Yet these errors – some of which could be reasonably attributed to poor copy editing, though this raises its own troubling questions – only break the surface of a much deeper problem. The tenth-grade world-history manual, for instance, drenches itself in black nationalist historical revisionism. The guide starts by allowing the word “African” to slip in and out of its racial connotation enough times to ensure that ancient Egypt comes across as an exclusively black nation, a theory widely disputed by Egyptologists. The authors then cite the notorious Portland Baseline Essays, George James’s Stolen Legacy, and other questionable reference points to reinforce their claims and state, predictably, that “Egypt was supreme in the leadership of civilization … Egyptian culture survived and flourished under the name and control of the Greeks.”

By relying so heavily on these Afrocentric authorities, the curriculum appears more intent on engaging in racial polemics than on teaching history. Approximately 5 per cent of the world history manual’s 164 pages, for instance, is devoted to making the case for black African migrations to the pre-Columbian Americas, an idea dismissed by most archaeologists and Mesoamerican experts.

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Even the chairman of Harvard’s Afro-American studies department, Henry Louis Gates Jr., now says that self-esteem theory lacks foundation. “When Laotian students in California ace their exams, it isn’t because the curriculum reinforces a rich sense of their Laotian heritage,” he told a Modern Language Association audience.” (source)