dismantling education one mandate at a time
Say what you will about school board members in Texas, but they’re consistent. Now if only they used all their fervor in boosting academic standards instead of tearing tearing them down into absurd over-simplifications of science and history, declaring that well established and proven scientific ideas about space and time are up for debate because a young earth creationist says so, appointing a crazed zealot as their chairman, then threatening to replace him with a lunatic who has a searing hatred for all public schools after he managed to lose his seat, and even after their former chairman and two of his cronies are defeated in their re-election bids, to keep wailing away at ensuring that no kids in Texas are allowed to have a well-rounded curriculum. In the last few days, the state’s board of education showed through the kinds of mandates that would make any far right sophist proud, going as far as to ban the word “capitalism” because it’s used by liberal professors.
Yes, you read that right. Instead of taking their cues from academics, who many of the school board members loathe in their roiling anti-intellectualism, they apparently decided to ask Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh what Texan academic standards to peruse. How else can you explain the notion that the word capitalism has to be struck from that curricula so it could be replaced with a buzzword from archconservative economic think tanks solely on the basis of irrational, partisan hatred?
The board removed the word “capitalism” from [state] standards, mandating that the term for that economic system be called “free enterprise” throughout the standards. Board members such as Terri Leo and Ken Mercer charged that “capitalism” is a negative term used by “liberal professors in academia.”
Really? That’s the ironclad expert justification? To use the term liberal the same way one would pronounce a diagnosis and say that it’s used by college professors? How could there be a clearer example of the searing hatred the creationist/culture war faction of the Texas SBoE has for anything that even resembles knowledge or education that doesn’t simply pound students over the head with their personal ideologies? I don’t think the duo in question, Leo and Mercer, seem to have a working neural synapse between them. Or perhaps the two share a brain that was left on a dark, dusty shelf somewhere before the meeting began. How does one even begin to describe how utterly inane and imbecilic this kind of reasoning is and the damage it will do? While a horde of far right ideologues pat each other on the back, praising American exceptionalism as they dilute the crucial educational standards of the nation’s second biggest state with nonsense and propaganda solely for the sake of their personal self-validation, they drag the country farther and farther behind. And then, they have the gall to call these standards “world class.” Are they even talking about the same world as we are?
To put it plainly, the school board members who thought it would be a great idea to turn a social studies class into an audition for right wing talk radio and declare that when teaching the importance of considering any and all opinions in a democratic republic, the teachers should really just explain that the students have the right to buy guns under the Second Amendment, are societal parasites. They complain about intrusive, heavy-handed government intervention in business and society, yet they get themselves elected to government posts, issue intrusive societal mandates, take advantage of government-run medical care for them and their families, get a paycheck funded by taxpayers, benefit from all the things modern science gives them while viciously smearing scientists and academics, and produce nothing positive in their wake. The fact that American students aren’t quite on par with other students in the developed world in countless international surveys should be a glaring example of the cost of having these people mandate educational standards.
But then again, I’m sure they can find some tenet in their “exceptionalism” doctrine that can somehow “prove” that not teaching kids science or math and pounding them over the head with talking points borrowed from a partisan, hypocritical news pundit instead of involving them in social debates, somehow produces education so superior to the rest of the world that no standardized test could fully measure its sheer brilliance. Or simply call their critics “liberal academic demagogues” and spit in their direction, as they usually do.
@gfish: I admit that when I was in HS in Killeen, TX, we didn’t have Social Studies; we had Texas History, American History, World HIstory, Government and Civics. Civics generally covered local government, while Government was pretty much focused on federal and state government.
You reckon any kids in today’s public schools are burdened with that load? And that doesn’t include four years of math (algebra I & II, plane geometry, solid geometry and calculus), four years of science, (general science, biology, chemistry and physics), two years of a foreign language, and four years of English (from diagraming sentences to Shakespeare.) Seems to me we have regressed of late.
Roll over Thomas Jefferson, tell James Madison the news. The idea was NOT that public schools would be job training centers. The idea was that they would produce the educated, informed citizens of a democratic republic. Responsible voters. Rational thinkers. People who would not be easily swayed by emotional appeals, nor led by demagogues.
That objective has been lost in the current tussle between science and religion (or some semblance of religion, I have no idea who these people really are. They can’t be that stupid; they surely have a hidden agenda.) Anyway, school boards, from Etoile, TX to Dover, PA , to the Texas School Book Depository (aka the Texas Board of Education) have denounced such Jeffersonian drivel and opted to train young workers, and see that they are properly indoctrinated.
You know what? I think they may be succeeding. My stepgrandson has no idea who he is. He never heard of the fifth ammendment and seems to feel that the system is stacked against him and he can’t win regardless. I can’t disagree, I don’t think he can. He sure as hell can’t win the way he’s going. Is that a sound basis upon which to build a democratic state? No. But it sure as hell works for an empire. Make sure the peasants are confused and demoralized.
gfish, can you link to a few of those surveys? They’d come in handy in a few debates I’ve been having lately. :)
Thanks.
can you link to a few of those surveys?
I can link to sources that provide the results of the surveys. Some are from an annual set of studies, like the ones done in 2005, 2007 and 2009 with little improvement. In the same line of evidence, there are a number of meta studies that show a few rather depressing statistics. You may also want to see a paper on how the standards vary across nations and how the lack of a true national standard in education contributes to the problem. But of course, if you tried to have a national standard in the U.S., you’ll be facing very loud conservative opposition…
Thanks, gfish… I figured you’d have some good links handy.
@gfish: I just had an epiphany! It’s all about exclusivisim. If you can get your kids thru college, whatever it takes: Religion, rodeo, horses, football, whatever; they will enter the exclusive next layer. From which layer will be excluded those peasants like I just described as my stepgrandson. It has nothing to do with religious beliefs, as long as they’re belief’s, faith, resolve, vision, direction. Who gives a damn what God they’re praying to as long as they’re focused on that degree. I wish I’d been that perspicacious when my kids were six of seven. When they graduate from college with a BBA, they will reject religion, but by then, they’re set up, and they will soon grasp that religion is a big part of business, and they will become devout again. No problem.
I thought America had dumbbed down, but Geezus, what is Texas going to be like when kids graduate from the Rush Limbaugh Institute in the 6th grade and then go on to be indoctrinated in 6 years of Republican Living, Be a Republican Politician-Home Wreck, Fascism As Reality, Fearmongering 101, Life-If they are black, brown or red, you don’t need them. Then they graduate to the Stormtrooper School where they learn to march in unison, salute with their right arm and set history back 100 years!