General Observations About History
He who controls the past controls the
future.
He who controls the present controls the past.
He who controls the present controls the past.
America is longer, larger, more
various, more beautiful, and more
terrible than anything anyone has ever
said about it.
The dogmas of the past are inadequate
to the stormy present . . . We must
disenthrall ourselves, and then we
shall save our country.
From the Right
We’re in an all-out moral and
spiritual civil war for the soul of
America, and the record of American
history is right at the heart of
it.
We are adding balance. History has
already been skewed. Academia is skewed
too far to the left.
Conservatives can be happy that
multiculturalism has not gone
unchecked.
I concluded that the [textbook]
adoption process would always be
politicized and that there was no way
to improve it. I concluded that it
should be abolished. It makes no sense
to have an elected or appointed school
board deciding which facts belong in
history textbooks and which scientific
ideas are valid. They do not have the
qualifications to do this and they
should not have the power to do
it.
It’s no secret that the people who
control public schools are at war with our
nation’s history, culture and
achievements. Since taxpayers foot the
bill, it is long overdue for [the Texas]
state board of education to correct many
textbook myths and lies about our
magnificent national heritage and
achievements.
This sanctimonious group [SBOE
conservatives] confirms every liberal
conceit about the ideological parochialism
of conservatives, especially Texas
conservatives. In doing so, they discredit
those of us who make real conservative
arguments based on individual rights and
limited government during this time of
unprecedented expansion of federal power
and spending.
My own review of the proposed curriculum
did not reveal anything plainly false, and
the oft-repeated accusations of outrageous
omission are demonstrably false.
From the Left
We have to face the unpleasant as well as
the affirmative side of the human story,
including our own story as a nation, our
own stories of our peoples. We have got to
have the ugly facts in order to protect us
from the official view of
reality.
They [Republican majority of Texas State
Board of Education] are rewriting history.
They can just pretend this is a white
America and Hispanics don’t
exist.
The social conservatives have perverted
accurate history to fulfill their own
agenda.
They [the Texas SBOE] want an American
history that ignores or marginalizes
African-Americans, women, Latinos,
immigrants and popular culture. Rather than
genuinely engaging the fundamental
conflicts that have shaped our past, they
prefer a celebratory history that denies
those fundamental conflicts.
The good news from all of this is that any
action of the Texas Board of Education takes to
purge the nation’s history of unpleasant
contradictions and turn it into “a
patriot’s history is doomed to
fail because the children reading the textbooks
and the teachers using them as a guide will not
be doing so in a vacuum.
For genuine college and work readiness to occur
the [Texas] Board must adhere to a more
transparent, fair, and inclusive process of
curriculum revisions, and it must make full and
effective use of the faculty and researchers
from our colleges and universities in Texas who
can offer expert assistance and
guidance.
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