I just read this on the Huffington Post.
I am - speechless.
From the Texas Freedom Network's live-blog of the board hearing: Board member Cynthia Dunbar wants to change a standard having students study the impact of Enlightenment ideas on political revolutions from 1750 to the present. She wants to drop the reference to Enlightenment ideas (replacing with “the writings of”) and to Thomas Jefferson. She adds Thomas Aquinas and others. Jefferson’s ideas, she argues, were based on other political philosophers listed in the standards. We don’t buy her argument at all. Board member Bob Craig of Lubbock points out that the curriculum writers clearly wanted to students to study Enlightenment ideas and Jefferson. Could Dunbar’s problem be that Jefferson was a Deist? The board approves the amendment, taking Thomas Jefferson OUT of the world history standards.
Texas Freedom Network's commentary: We’re just picking ourselves up off the floor. The board’s far-right faction has spent months now proclaiming the importance of emphasizing America’s exceptionalism in social studies classrooms. But today they voted to remove one of the greatest of America’s Founders, Thomas Jefferson, from a standard about the influence of great political philosophers on political revolutions from 1750 to today.
5 comments:
OMG.
I.. I... I'm so disgusted I can't even begin to think of a response other than disgust and outrage.
Jefferson? Aquinas? Posers.
(P.S. Aquinas is not even an AMERICAN.)
To add insult to injury what plays in Texas gets used in every other state because Texas is so big it influences what is in the textbooks used in most schools in America.So they are not just messing with Texas, they are messing with every school child!
How can you remove Jefferson from the history standards while we still live in the US? I mean really. Not only was he a President of this country, but he kinda WROTE THE PAPER that effected our separation from Britain in the first place.
This had better not stand. We had better not stand for it.
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