Just How Nutty is the
Right-wing fanatics are turning "
an oxymoron.
by Jim Hightower
Alternet.org
March 25, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146156/hightower:_just_how_nutty_is_the_texas_board_of_education
In the good-and-good-for-you department, food scientists
are now touting the health benefits of enjoying a
handful of nuts every day.
I, for one, am glad, because I love nuts -- pecans,
hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, you-name-'em. But my
favorite nuts, by far, are the homegrown natives that
have taken root in one particularly fertile area of my
state: the
any nuttier than this bunch!
This board, little-known even to us Texans, has lately
risen to national notoriety, making our state's
educational system a punch line for comedians
everywhere. That's because a handful of ultra-right-wing
nutcases have taken over this elected overseer of
educational policy, and they're hell-bent to supplant
classroom education with their own brand of ideological
indoctrination.
Their way of achieving this political goal is to rewrite
the state standards that textbook publishers must follow
to get the lucrative contracts for providing teaching
materials for every student in the state, from first
grade through high school.
Their latest exercise in ideological correctness comes
at the expense of the social studies curriculum. They
spent last week going through guidelines for history,
government, economics and sociology textbooks, purging
references that offend their doctrinaire sensibilities
and substituting their own nutty biases and ignorance.
How nutty? Take Thomas Jefferson. They did! They
literally did take
political thinkers from the Enlightenment period,
replacing him with a favorite of Christian
fundamentalists, John Calvin. Thus, the prime author of
our Declaration of
term "separation between church and state."
Any concepts that might spur progressive thoughts in
young minds were also expunged. "Justice," for example,
was stripped from a list of virtues meant to teach
grade-schoolers the characteristics of good citizenship.
No doubt the board majority would love to get its hands
on the Pledge of Allegiance's assertion of "justice for
all," but luckily, the pledge doesn't come under the
members' purview. Yet.
The nuts were able to strike "responsibility for the
common good" from the citizenship characteristics list,
however, and they just missed deleting the American
ideal of "equality." They also narrowly lost on a vote
to impose a new requirement that students be taught that
the civil rights movement created "unreasonable
expectations," but they did manage to balance the
positive impact of Martin Luther King Jr. with an
insistence that the "positives" of Joe McCarthy's witch-
hunt for commies and of Jefferson Davis' secessionist
government also be taught.
Likewise, the full-tilt rightists expelled Delores
Huerta, the much-admired farm worker leader, from a list
of "good citizenship" models, airily dismissing this
courageous champion of justice as a socialist. On the
other hand, they mandated that Phyllis Schlafly, the
Heritage Foundation and Newt Gingrich's Contract With
resurgence" in
One especially delicious moment came when the board
considered a listing of world leaders who fought
political repression. On the list was Archbishop Oscar
Romero of El Salvador, who led an indigenous poor
people's movement in the 1980s before the country's
right-wing death squads assassinated him as he was
celebrating mass.
The board cut Romero from the list, declaring that he
lacked the stature of such other repression fighters as
Gandhi. After all, one board member explained, unlike
Gandhi, Romero had not had a movie made about his life,
so how important could who've been? But -- oops! -- there
was a popular 1989 feature film called "Romero" about
the archbishop's exemplary life. The board was
embarrassed, but it axed him anyway.
Words were banned, too. The phrase "democratic
societies," for example was replaced by the cumbersome
"societies with representative government." And even the
term "capitalism" was censored for having a negative
connotation. Instead, the board decreed that "free
enterprise" be used throughout all social studies
courses. In addition, all references to the Age of
Enlightenment were dropped, because ... well, because
these full-fledged political purists don't want any
concept based on reason getting into the heads of our
school kids.
folderal, but these doctrinaire morons are turning
"
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer,
public speaker, and author of the new book, "Swim
Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the
Flow." (Wiley, March 2008) He publishes the monthly
"Hightower Lowdown," co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
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