Rewriting History
The extremist conservative agenda strikes again. As most news-aware Americans have heard by now, the Texas School Board has issued its own ideologically driven “standards” for school textbooks. These standards rewrite the Social Studies and American History curricula to stress the conservative viewpoint. For example, these standards delete Thomas Jefferson from the history books.
The decisions of the Texas School Board are significant because they have such a large market share; their decisions influence which books are printed by textbook manufacturers and are therefore available to schools in the other 49 states.
The response from the media has generally been to applaud the Texas School Board for standing up to those pernicious liberal historians. For example, the conservative mouthpiece of National Public Radio aired a nice long segment with the tagline, “conservatives are correct — many history books lean left.” The guest on the show proposed at one point that in order to present children with a balanced worldview, Glenn Beck’s book “A Patriot’s History of the United States” should be taught in history class, to balance out the imagined liberal bias of the other texts.
Needless to say, I have grown extremely disappointed with the biased viewpoint and unabashedly conservative agenda being promoted on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.
The greatest failing in the show’s coverage of the Texas School Board controversy was its willful omission of one of the most important points in the Board’s standards-setting decision:
In its decision, the Texas School Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the history books.
This is not just a minor tweak of perspective. This is not merely an attempt to whitewash slavery. This is a radical rewrite of American history, and in both the piece linked above and also in its original story on the subject, Talk of the Nation failed to mention this critical information at all, even briefly.
Thomas Jefferson was an important thinker, a diplomat, a patriot, the man who penned the Declaration of Independence, sat on the Constitutional Convention, and served his country as the third President of the United States under our Constitution. There is a very good reason his likeness is engraved upon Mount Rushmore: Jefferson was by definition one of the Founding Fathers of our Republic.
You can’t just delete all references to Thomas Jefferson from a textbook because you think his views were too liberal. That’s a dramatic rewrite of American history. In fact without Thomas Jefferson I would argue you are no longer teaching American history. Down in Texas, they will be teaching a course in historical fiction.
I hope the rest of the country will band together to buy textbooks that are not rewritten to the standards of the extremist conservative agenda.
Furthermore, I hope NPR will start making an effort to report a less biased perspective on the news.
Tags: American history, conservative bias, media, NPR, standards, Talk of the Nation, Texas School Board, textbooks, Thomas Jefferson