The Texas State Board of Education is attempting to distort the story of American History and to establish a right wing version, and just at a time when membership of the Board is changing! Textbook decisions that affect not just Texas, but the whole nation, due to the large number of students in the Lone Star State, which encourages textbook publishers to tend to follow Texas standards of what should be taught in the publication of nationwide textbooks, endangers history education as we know it!
The conservatives want to emphasize the free enterprise system; organized religion; the conservative resurgence in politics in the 1980s and 1990s; and the role of pressure groups such as the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.
They also want to deemphasize the New Deal and Great Society; the civil rights movement; treatment of American foreign policy as imperialistic; and take such people as Ralph Nader and Ross Perot out of the curriculum and promote the significance of Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on an even keel with Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant!
The role of racial and religious minorities would be toned down, and the concept of American as a Christian nation would be promoted. The concept that the federal government regulation and intervention is evil would also be emphasized, and the significance of the new Tea Party Movement would be taught.
This attempt by the Right in Texas is a plan to propagandize their version of history, a totally distorted view that any American historian, and really any educated, open minded person outside of the history field, would condemn! This is an attempt at brainwashing to promote the views of an elite that already has distorted science, and will not stop until people of principle step up and fight for freedom of thought, rather than distorted views of the history of our nation!
Yes, we can mention a lot of what the Texas State Board of Education has proposed in the curriculum, but NOT at the expense of alternative views and free inquiry! The historical associations (the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians), and local and regional historical associations, and universities, museums and historical societies, need to unite against this attempt to destroy and distort history education and knowledge by these right wing extremist activists in Texas!