NAACP president: Texas curriculum will turn world ‘upside down’ for kids

[babsbunny]

NAACP president: Texas curriculum will turn world ‘upside down’ for kids

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0519/naacp-president-texas-curriculum-lock-kids-dark-ages/

By Sahil Kapur
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010 -- 10:36 am

Previewing the tone of his testimony in Austin on Wednesday ahead of a crucial vote, NAACP president Ben Jealous forcefully condemned the influential Texas State Board of Education's slew of pending revisions to history and social studies curriculum.

The modified curriculum – approved in March on a party line vote and facing a final motion this Friday – diminishes Thomas Jefferson’s significance and commitment to secularism, tempers criticism of McCarthyism, downplays Darwin's theory of evolution, and emphasizes the "conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s."

[wtmusic]

1. Where's that conservative resurgence today?

Guess America decided it kinda sucked.

[TexasObserver]

2. recommend

[rabs]

3. This is what left me dazed

The (Texas) education board has dropped references to the slave trade in favour of calling it the ''Atlantic triangular trade'',

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Atlantic triangular trade??? --- only thing I can imagine is that the traders brought slaves to the colonies, shipped the cotton, tobacco, etc. to England and then sailed down to Africa to get more slaves, then back to the colonies, completing the triangle ???


Quote from this article

http://www.smh.com.au/world/evangelicals-rewrite-texan-curriculum-20100518-vcax.html

:kick: and recc

[CatholicEdHead]

4. So focus on the business "free market" aspect of the time

and downplay the slaves as commodities of the time or something like that. :puke:.

[Posteritatis]

6. Pretty much. (nt)

[Posteritatis]

5. That's roughly the idea

The Europeans would take manufactured goods - decorations, weapons, alcohol, etc. - to Africa, where some of the local powers (or European slavers) would use them to get slaves, which were taken to the Americas for agricultural "work," the products of which were sent to Europe and worked into more manufactured goods.

It does have the point that the trading system at the time was pretty involved and certainly didn't just involve slaves - and did heavily involve the Euroepan nations for awhile! - but I don't exactly trust the Texas SBOE's good faith in that matter. I'm convinced that they're more interested in the whole "sweep the mistreatment of blacks under the rug because recognizing that was wrong was librul!" aspect of the whole renaming.

[stuball111]

7. I saw this on MSNBC tonight and thought...

If the pro-business, global economy preaching right thinks this is going to help American kids be educated well enough to compete in an expanding "global economy" when they leave school, they will get a major shock! Any kid who gets a job in business and has to travel overseas to compete globally, will find that they are lost. They will find that foreigners know more about his or her native land than they do, let alone anything about the places they travel to,and they will look like idiots!

[Number23]

8. Rec'd. These people are out of their damned minds