The Peter Morrison Report
Summary of this week's report:
The conservatives on the Texas Board of Education deserve our
thanks for working to make school textbooks accurate and unbiased.
It was a long, tough fight, but our side prevailed in one of the
major battles for the minds of the school children of Texas. Left
wing ideologues were outraged that conservatives stood up and
blocked them from imposing even more liberalism on state textbooks,
and so were their friends in the mainstream media, but in the end,
the conservative bloc was able to keep a lot of liberal bias out of
our kids' social studies textbooks.
Full report:
Over the course of the past several months the national media has
been discussing the school textbook wars in Texas. Typically,
almost every article or report was actually liberal sermonizing
disguised as journalism. In the past few weeks, these stories
have reached a hysterical crescendo in the mainstream media, as it
became clear that conservatives were going to triumph in our
efforts to keep some of the liberal bias out of school textbooks.
There are few things in life that will have more influence on the
future than what our children are taught in the classrooms of
public schools. Private and home schools are wonderful, and I'm a
strong supporter of both, but the number of students in public
schools is far, far greater than the numbers enrolled in private
and home schooling, combined. Unfortunately, liberals realized
this long before conservatives did, and over the decades our kids'
textbooks have been increasingly filled with left-wing propaganda.
Conservatives finally woke up back in the 1970s, thanks to the
heroic efforts of people like Mel and Norma Gabler, the husband and
wife team who spent decades exposing the liberal indoctrination
that was being passed off as education in Texas schools. Even
since then, the school textbook approval process in the Lone Star
state has been a major battleground between conservatives and
liberals. This year was no different, as the guidelines for social
studies textbooks that will be in force for the next ten years were
up for review.
I was a member of one of this year's panels that produced the
recommendations the Board of Education was seeking to implement.
From my first hand experience in the earlier part of this process,
I can tell you the story of what really happened. It's nothing
like the heavily biased and distorted accounts that appeared in the
media across the country. To hear the MSM tell it, Texas was
caught up in some sort of right wing extremist hysteria; a
combination of a witch hunt to eliminate from history books
anything conservatives disagree with and an iron fisted campaign
to force a false version of history on our schools simply to impose
a far right wing agenda.
That was how the media reports spun things, but in reality, what
was happening was the exact opposite. Conservatives were the ones
who were fighting to remove liberal orthodoxies with no basis in
facts from our school textbooks and to prevent the left-wingers
from making the texts even more liberal than they already were.
Self proclaimed "progressives", of course, pretend to be completely
objective when it comes to textbook content, so in their minds
these left leaning school books aren't slanted at all, but
completely unbiased.
That's nonsense, of course, and it's why liberals have been
squealing like stuck pigs for the past few months, trying to scare
Texans and Americans with horror stories about "right wing
extremism" taking over our state school board, when all
conservatives were doing was restoring a small measure of balance.
Don McLeroy, the conservative Republican who heads the Texas Board
of Education, called the liberals out for their dishonesty in this
regard. "We are adding balance...History has already been skewed.
Academia is skewed too far to the left."
Few things get liberals more agitated than talking about the
Christian heritage of the United States, and it's no coincidence
that much of the negative media coverage centered on this subject.
As SBOE member David Bradley pointed out, "There's a hostility
toward faith, specifically Christianity."
Liberal revisionists refuse to acknowledge that most of the
Founding Fathers believed that religious principles should inform
government, and for them, religion meant Christianity, period.
In addition, when liberals don't get their way, they usually start
slinging accusations of racism. According to the Austin
American-Statesman, liberal board member Mary Helen Berlanga spent
almost all of her time on the board trying to get lots of minor
historical figures added to textbooks simply because they were
minorities. Berlanga was the one who was obsessed with race, but
when conservatives blocked her proposals because they believe
people should be included in history books because of their
contributions, not the color of their skin, she tried to make
conservatives out to be the racists. As she left a board meeting
in a huff, she slandered the conservative board members: "We can
just pretend that this is a white America. Hispanics don't exist."
The irony is that just before she walked out of the meeting,
Berlanga had made a motion to identify minority Medal of Honor
winners. In her mind, it's apparently only important to study Medal
of Honor winners that aren't white, yet she has the gall to accuse
the conservative board members of being racist!
Thankfully the conservatives on the Board of Education refused to
be intimidated by these reckless accusations of racism (by people
obsessed with race themselves), and didn't cave in. They even had
the courage to remove "hip hop music" as a "significant cultural
contribution" to be studied by Texas school kids. Their victory
isn't just important for Texas, though, because many textbook
publishers follow Texas' guidelines when coming out with books for
the national school market. So, thanks to the brave
conservatives on the Board of Education, for the next ten years
millions of school textbooks will be more accurate and balanced.
They deserve our thanks.
The State Board of Education is receiving a lot of negative media
attention for doing the right thing and they need to hear
encouragement from their constituents. Please send them an email at:
sboesupport@tea.state.tx.us
Sources:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6909202.html
http://www.statesman.com/news/texas-politics/politics-sex-religion-are-all-fair-game-at-344354.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html?ref=education
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4098847/were-not-rewriting-historyhttp://www.PeterMorrisonReport.comhttp://www.facebook.com/morrisonreport
The Peter Morrison Report
PO Box 8742, Lumberton, TX 77657, USA
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1 comments:
Thank you Texas Board of Education.
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