Liberals Bemoan Pro-American History Standards
>> March 27, 2010
The Peter Morrison ReportSummary 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, USARead more...
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