Regardless of your political leanings, it is entirely unacceptable to completely rewrite history; it is always acceptable to question recorded history when presented with new evidence that has been uncovered, thoroughly studied by numerous reputable historians, and backed up with evidentiary support.
Take, for example, Michele Bachmann. Now, it would be easy to simply point out that, regardless of her political leanings, the woman is batshit crazy. Regardless of her clearly evident insanity, her grasp on American history (or world history, for that matter) is suspect:
“But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States,” Bachmann added, claiming “men like John Quincy Adams… would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.”
That quote was delivered to an audience prior to her announcing her candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination at an event hosted by Iowans for Tax Relief. When reporters pounced on these two assertions, the first that the Framers were even alive when slavery was abolished or even tried to do so, or that John Quincy Adams was twenty and had just graduated from Harvard when the Constitution was drafted and adopted in 1787, and was the son of, but never was, a Founding Father, Bachmann repeated the oft reviled "Gotha!" accusation.
On the other side of the aisle, the Democratic party would very much like to have people forget that their Dixiecrat party members in the South were instrumental in keeping Jim Crow laws alive and well. Many Democratic lawmakers have pointed out that Democrats have always worked tirelessly to promote civil rights and equality, and if time began in 1960, that would be true. History, however, has something entirely different to say about that.
Unfortunately, those who are currently rewriting history to align with their own political ideologies have in no way followed this commonly accepted practice.
This leads us to today's Reason:
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Number 6: Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned to Repeat It
Sadly, the reason behind this decade-long push to rewrite history and fundamentally alter the way history is taught to students is transparently attributable to only one political ideology.
To be fair, history has been adapted over the years by other interest groups, not to completely rewrite history, but to augment historical texts to reflect the experiences of other peoples based on historical information that has been researched, studied, and verified by numerous reputable historians who have verified these facts, been peer reviewed, and chosen for inclusion in history texts.
This process is not being followed by those who would rewrite history, today.
Instead, those who are in control of this rewriting are doing so based on their personal beliefs and preferences, suppositions that bear no basis in reality, and information that is suspect at best.
Take for example the following proceedings from the Texas State Board of Education hearings where they began contesting the way history is presented and proposing changes that best suit their own political leanings and ideologies. The problem with these hearings? No historical scholars, history teachers, or experts were present at any time during these hearings.
Below are some examples from these hearings. I will be presenting these proceedings without inject my own personal comments:
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March 10, 2010 - 6:11 PM - The board is beginning with the high school world history course. The board is considering whether references to dates use the shorthand BC and AD instead of BCE and CE. Some board members suggest BC and AD are more traditional. Yes, but that’s not what students will encounter (for the most part) when they get to college. Board member Mavis Knight urges the board to ensure that students know historians use both dating methods. But board member Terri Leo says she wants the traditional dating approach: “I disagree with the whole philosophy of why we date.”
BC & AD, by the way, won. Lowe, who had established a precedent that she not vote as board chair broke her own policy and voted in favor of this 1st amendment to the curriculum.
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March 11, 2010 - 9:30 - 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.
9:45 - Here’s the amendment Dunbar changed: “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” Here’s Dunbar’s replacement standard, which passed: “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.” Not only does Dunbar’s amendment completely change the thrust of the standard. It also appalling drops one of the most influential political philosophers in American history — Thomas Jefferson.
This amendment passed.
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March 11, 2010 - 11:59 - Board member Ken Mercer suggests this standard: “understand how government taxation and regulations can serve as restrictions to private enterprise.”
This amendment was passed.
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March 11, 2010 - 12:04 - The current standards draft currently refer to the economic system that exists in the United States as “free enterprise (capitalist, free market).” Mercer offers an amendment to strike out “(capitalist, free market)” in the standards and leave just “free enterprise.” The board’s far-right members have repeatedly complained (absurd) that “capitalism” is a negative term and, in any case, that state statute requires students to learn about the “free enterprise system.” Scholars on the curriculum teams had argued that “capitalism” and “free market” are commonly used terms in economics courses and everyday discourse.
Terri Leo: “I do think words mean things. . . . I see no reason, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia.”
Pat Hardy notes that the scholar who recommended that “capitalism” and “free market” be used in the standards teaches at Texas A&M and is a Republican. He is “not some kind of crazy liberal,” she says.
At 12:15, this amendment passed.
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March 11, 2010 - 12:28 - Board member Mavis Knight offers the following amendment: “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” Knight points out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state.
12:32 - Board member Cynthia Dunbar argues that the Founders didn’t intend for separation of church and state in America. And she’s off on a long lecture about why the Founders intended to promote religion. She calls this amendment “not historically accurate.”
The amendment passes on a straight party-line vote, 5-10; Republicans vote "no," Democrats vote "yes."
12:38 - Let the word go out here: The Texas State Board of Education today refused to require that students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others. They voted to lie to students by omission.
Here was the amendment again: “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others.” And this board, on a vote of 10-5, said they don’t want Texas students to learn about this basic protection for the religious freedom of everyone in America.
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March 11, 2010 - 3:38 - Cargill moves to strike this standard: “differentiate between sex and gender as social constructs and determine how gender and socialization interact.” Cargill argues that this standard would lead to students learning about “transexuals, transvestites and who knows what else.”
3:40 - Lawrence Allen of Houston notes that most high schools include gay and lesbian youth. Mavis Knight says she read the standard as an opportunity for students to study about changing gender roles for men and women over time.
3:45 - Cargill says her amendment is based on her Google research.
3:47 - Mavis Knight points out that the curriculum writers are education professionals. She argues its insulting to think that teachers would do a Google search to find out what to teach students.
3:48 - Ken Mercer: this is about sex.
3:50 - The amendment to strip out the standard passes.
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March 11, 2010 - 4:35 - Cargill moves to strip Santa Barraza from a list of Texas artists in the Grade 7 Texas history course. She wants to replace Barraza with Tex Avery and argues that Barraza isn’t appropriate for seventh-graders and apparently is distributing what some board members seem to think is an inappropriate painting. Other board members are appalled that Cargill would take an artist out because of a single painting that would never show up in a textbook anyway.
4:42 - David Bradley argues that the painting would be inappropriate for seventh-graders. We don’t know what the painting is, but it’s inconceivable that any publisher would include a nude painting in a textbook. Will this silliness ever end?
4:47 - Mary Helen Berlanga: Should the board now censor Michelangelo because of the nudes in some of his artwork?
4:51 - The amendments passes. Barraza is out, Avery is in.
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March 11, 2010 - 5:36 - The board adds Bill Martin Jr. back to the Grade 3 standards. The board had removed the author of the children’s book “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” in January, mistaking him for a man with the same name who had written a book on Marxism.
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All of this took place over two days. The full proceedings took place over a series of months during which the Texas State Board of Education completely changed the way history and other subjects are taught, not because of any newly discovered information, but because the curriculum didn't settle with their political ideologies and preferences. These changes were passed in May of 2010.
This is problematic because there are only two states who play a major role in textbook sales - California and Texas. This means that when schools around the nation go to purchase their next round of textbooks, they may be inadvertently (or perhaps purposely) purchasing textbooks filled with inaccuracies, lies, and rewritten history.
These changes were not met well by pundits, organizations, and historians on both sides of the political spectrum:
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From a 2011 report from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute:
"Texas’s heavily politicized 2010 revisions to its social studies curriculum have attracted
massive national attention. Indeed, both in public hearings and press interviews, the
leaders of the State Board of Education made no secret of their evangelical Christian right agenda, promising to inculcate biblical principles, patriotic values, and American
exceptionalism. And politics do figure heavily in the resulting TEKS."
This report gave the TEKS U.S. History Curriculum the following grades:
Grade: D
Content and Rigor: 2/7
Clarity and Specificity: 1/3
Total Score: 3/10
It is an excellent report (and how frequently do I say that about any report released by a Conservative organization), and one worth reading in its entirety.
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From a November 2011 report written for the Social Studies Faculty Collaborative:
"...the K-12 educational system in Texas is founded upon an inadequate set of standards.
The Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) were first drafted in 1998 to serve as a
systemic blueprint for the state’s textbooks, curriculum, standardized tests, and teacher
certification credentials. However, within less than a decade it became apparent that Texas
students were not being adequately prepared for college. In response, the Texas Higher
Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Education Agency oversaw the creation of a set of
comprehensive College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) that were published in January
2008, but these new standards were not incorporated into the revised version of the TEKS
prepared in 2010. Because the standards for secondary education (TEKS) fail to meet the state’s
college readiness standards (CCRS), students—and the teachers who teach them, and those
seeking to become teachers—are left facing a gap between the state’s secondary curriculum and
the realities of the college learning experience. This report aims to bridge the gap between the
ineffective TEKS and the under-utilized CCRS."
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The sad thing about these changes is that the Texas State Board of Education is completely free to enact these changes every couple of years with little to no oversight. The TSBOE is a collection of lawyers, dentists, and realtors with no teaching experience whatsoever. Whenever experts were brought in, they were brought in NOT by the TSBOE, but by the attending community members. The amount of time allotted community members to speak was 30 minutes, but was "graciously expanded" to two hours in order accommodate the massive amounts of protests against the proposed amendments.
Unfortunately, these protests went largely unheeded.
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I specifically bring up this example of historical revisionism to point out how easily this can be accomplished.
A far more insidious method of changing how we learn and remember history is perpetrated every day on television news programs; not only on Faux News, but on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, & NBC. Commentators, pundits, and politicians go on television for the exclusive purpose of asserting their own versions of history, completely uncorroborated by either written facts, scholars, historians, or reputable expert opinion to back up their "facts."
Worse, still, is that none of the current crop of "journalists" feels the need to stop them from presenting false facts as verified truth. Rather than do their jobs as journalists by serving their patriotic duty to report facts instead of opinions and lies, they would rather present the false impression that they are "presenting both sides of the argument."
There is a difference between presenting "both sides of the argument" and "avoiding actual journalism;" between "presenting facts and letting the audience decide," and "allowing unchecked opinion to run rampant without fact-checking their claims."
It is an embarrassment for this nation that we, the citizens, and those in the media allow this historical revisionism to not only occur, but to continue and stand as a valid point of view.
It is not a valid point of view that minorities have only come this far because of the noble acts of white people; it is not a valid point of view that teaching about racism, segregation, slavery, and continued prejudice is a liberal approach to teaching history; it is not a valid point of view that Joseph McCarthy was a patriotic hero.
These aren't perceptions of history - they are lies. They are not alternate interpretations - they are lies.
It was never controversial until recently that questioning these John Birchers became an attack against "historical alternatives." There was a point in America's history where this kind of nonsense wouldn't even make it to talk radio, much less onto television, nor would it continue to be validated by allowing these idiocies to go uncontested and uncorrected.
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Next on the list, Reason 5: All Our Gall Is Split Into Three Parts - how our nation continues to be divided by political ideologies that fall along traditional geographic lines...and how that weakens us as a nation.
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Erekson, K.A. (November 2011) . Bridging the Gap Between K-12 and College Readiness Standards in Texas: Recommendations for U.S. History. The Texas Faculty Collaboratives College & Career Readiness Initiative. http://www.txfacultycollaboratives.org/images/stories/assets/documents/SocStudies_docs/Bridging_the_Gap.pdf
(n.p.). (2011) . Texas - U.S. History. The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011. http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2011/20110216_SOSHS/SOSS_USHistory_Texas.pdf
(n.p.). (March 10, 2010) . Blogging the Social Studies Debate III. The Official Blog of the Texas Freedom Network. http://tfninsider.org/2010/03/10/blogging-the-social-studies-debate-iii/
(n.p.). (March 11, 2010) . Blogging the Social Studies Debate IV. The Official Blog of the Texas Freedom Network. http://tfninsider.org/2010/03/11/blogging-the-social-studies-debate-iv/
(n.p.). (March 11, 2010) . Blogging the Social Studies Debate VI. The Official Blog of the Texas Freedom Network. http://tfninsider.org/2010/03/11/blogging-the-social-studies-debate-vi/
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