Texas Board Of Ed officially out to make students ignorant rednecks

welp

Christ, I had to read the article in bits and pieces just to keep my blood pressure level.

Sometimes I hate my state so fucking much. The contradiction of something like this happening while the amazing SXSW conference just gets underway here creates a horrible/awesome stew that makes my brain hurt

Mindblowing. That reads like the worst joke.

Fwd to my sister in law.

She'll flip a lid if she hasn't already heard about this.

How do you teach about the pilgrims without teaching about religious freedom?!

Sorry to lump any Chewers in with this as collateral damage, but seriously, FUCK THE SOUTH.

Home school or private schooling is looking better and better considering public education is going down the tubes fast.

No worries, we don't take it personally. The ignorant rednecks suck but hey, we have great weather, better liquor and better looking women. So we get over it.

Watch out, Mr Clark! When I say stuff about the south everyone flips out.

Yeah, but they peak early.

[insert pedo bear pic]

As a New Englander, I find your comments offensive.

Go reply to 476 threads, you'll get over it.

I'm still cool with allowing Texas to secede from the Union. Wouldn't miss it.

No offense taken, Justin. I've been singing FTS my entire life. I bet if I posted this news on my FB wall it would be showered with praise immediately.

You'd miss their chief export, assholes.

Somebody called for me?

Also:

omgomgomgomgomg.

First off, Texas isn't the South. Cute how they want to be, but sorry it just isn't. It really is its own area. The South has its own idiots to deal with.

Second, most teachers will ignore the bullshit and teach what they have to to prepare their students. This is further proof that public education should be in the hands of educators and not parents or appointed and elected officials.

OK, I have to ask this question. Why the fuck are parents being in charge of setting the curriculum for schools? Don't you have a working government? Is it still the 1850s and you either have to cross deserts on foot and risk death or sail half around the world to get from one side of the country to another?

Isn't Austin referred to as "an oasis in a sea of reality"?

Don't apologize.

Patton Oswalt's definitive assessment of Austin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5pQ_...=youtube_gdata

Idiocracy has been the rule sense the start of history, and will be the mostly cause of the apocalypse. So why worry about it happening in Texas.

Actually, progress has been the rule, believe it or not.

OK, sorry, I know it's not perfect but we need to start removing curriculum related decisions from state control: They just cut TJ from American History. That is unfathomable to my mind

HE WROTE THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND IS ON THE NICKLE



"They did what?!"

Without Jefferson and the La. Purchase there might not even be a state of Texas


EDIT:

To help myself not break down in tears over the death of education in America, here is a West Wing quote that I felt was appropriate:

This is what happens when you get your information from Think Progress.

source

Even idiots make progress, or progress is not a sign of intellect.

Wait, I just remembered, Thomas Jefferson is also on the TWO DOLLAR BILL, not just the nickel! If the Texas board of education goes forward with their proposed plan to rewrite American History in the image of a 'Left Behind' novel, no one in Texas will know who is on the Two Dollar Bill

Most people will continue to be narrow-minded and believe that America's founders were staunch believers. Scientists are baffled.

It's Texas. They're a state that wants to secede from the Union because of government spending, but they're one of the biggest utilizer's of federal aid. And Rick Perry is their governor.

And thank god for this. I grew up in a liberal-leaning household in Texas. I never felt like my education was compromised for the sake of a political agenda, and I attribute that entirely to the educators. If anything, I often felt bad for them and the wasted classtime they occasionally had to spend arguing with stubborn students about something like evolution. Ignorance never came from the teachers, it came from the students, who learned it from their parents long before they entered the classroom.

Care to share any thoughts on the rest of it, Snaieke? Or are you going to do what you always do when the right does something indefensible, i.e. ignore it?

You know what? Let them "stand athwart history" as the saying goes and yell at the top of their lungs for it to stop. For all their temporary victories, their defeat is inevitable. Western civilization overcame the dark ages in the end. What hope do these bozos have?

Well I fear we're headed for very bad times, in the not too distant future. We don't seem to have out act together, as a nation or a species, so once the water shortages start and our country is bankrupt from trying to deal with the havoc wrought by climate change, I think that these bozos will have quite a bit of power sadly.

New dark ages ahead, IMHO

double post.

Fuck you, how's that?

Its actually really a matter of timeframe. There have been times, decades and centuries in the history of mankind, when in some places progress did halt, and was actually reverted. The dark ages was a long, painful step back from the roman empire due to christianity and its influence, as well as a lot of other factors. Japan stagnated twice during its history, only getting ahead due to culture shocks from the outside, and lets not get into the repercussions of communism/stalinism in russia.

So, while yes, on a scale of millennia mankind is always making progress, for an individuals lifespan, there is precedent for things going backwards for a while

Mind you, the basic idea behind these changes are quite simple: Everything in todays america is politics. Within a decade, you guys became obsessed with it, and it creates an environment where people get REALLY protective of their values, and try to rush and preserve the world they want to see and be part of. If you manage to inject politics, quietly and simply, into basic education, you got a winner... because sooner or later, a ton of people grow up who were fed a lot of your values and ideas.

Machiavelli would approve. He was an ass, too.

This is just really, really bad history.

First, while the debate about what, if any, role Christianity played in the downfall of the Roman empire has going on since Augustine's The City of God, most people who think critically about history and don't let their visceral hatred for the Church blind them to rational argument agree that the likelier culprits are things like extending the territory too far for an ancient state to govern and defend effectively and having lead in the water supply.

Second, the Church was actually a force for good, overall, in the dark ages. It's the only thing that kept the academic tradition academic collections alive in the West, through the monasteries, after the fall of Rome. Without Christianity, the Muslim traders that finally ventured into the heart of the Occident would have found completely illiterate interlocutors with little or no appreciation for their scholarship. That is, without the Church, there is no Renaissance and no modern Western world.

Third, due to the above factors, the "dark ages" really weren't that dark. Medicine, for instance was still a vibrant and innovative area of human inquiry in the Western world during the dark ages. The first recognizable neurosurgeries in the West took place during this period.

Cuch, I was always under the impression that one of the main monastic bastions of that academic learning were the Irish monks, the monasteries on the island becoming almost like arks or knowledge as the dark ages raged around them. Is that true?

Well, in all honesty, you cant just lump the "church" all into one heap, so I ll apologize for overly simplifying here.
Several monastic orders, for example, did their best to advance medicine, brewing, literature, tech and all kinds of other fields.
There WAS a strong anti-progress current coming from the centralized roman-catholic church, and as far as I was taught, many areas in europe suffered from a severe step back in terms of quality of life, safety, hygiene and general education in comparison to the roman empire. Especially rural areas in todays france, spain and northern italy took a step back during the dark/middle ages.

Now, its an accepted thesis that the renaissance and all that follows it was a development stemming from the influence of the roman catholic church, or rather, that the role said church played culminated in something of a rebellion. So, one could claim that in the long run, it helped progress... but that was exactly the point I was making. In the LONG run, there isnt a way to stop progress.. but in the short run, from the perspective of one individual, there are examples scattered around history of some progressive developments being lost in a conservative movement, and not showing up again, or actually being part of daily life, for a long time.

The perfect example is probably the religious freedom to be had in ancient polytheistic rome, vs. how long it took to get back to that point in europe again. Or, alternatively, the varying degrees of homophobia between today, the renaissance, the middle ages and ancient greece... now thats one "two steps forward, two steps back" story right there.

My comment was directed as Kate and her Think Progress quote about how she concluded Jefferson was removed from AMERICAN history.

It was WORLD history, not American history and it wasn't like Jefferson was removed from the entire book, it was one section and one question.

There will be more than enough on Jefferson in the American history and Government classes..

Of those 300, apparently only Calvin raised concerns... The final vote is in May, it isn't like this is the finished product..

In the period between the Edicts of Milan and the Great Schism--during which much of the "dark ages" took place--you sort of can lump the Christian Church into one group. It's the reason the Roman Catholic Church has the word "Catholic" in the title.

Also, the Church wasn't as bad as most people make it out to be, in terms of things like science and the like. It did fund the majority of scientific research prior to, during, and after the Renaissance in Europe, mostly because they needed astronomers to let them know how to schedule the liturgical calendar. It isn't until the end of the medieval period/beginning of the Renaissance period that the Roman Catholic Church starts to get really weird and that's because it's the time it goes from a mostly ecclesiastical organization to a state and the heart of economic and political power in Europe. Power corrupts.

In terms of religious freedom, Rome was not better than the Church at the height of its political power. It just had a different favored religion. You're sort of forgetting that religious freedom in Rome was tolerated so long as you were willing to partake in the Imperial Cult. The reason the Jews and Christians--and prior to Constantine Christianity was really just a messianic sect of Judaism---got into so much trouble with Rome is they refused to do that.

You're also sort of forgetting that, after Constantine, Rome and Christianity are the same organization. They basically just switched out the Imperial Cult for Christianity and turned the Parthenon into a Christian church. The reason things like homophobia and anti-Judaism spring up in Constantinian Christianity is he backed the anti-Semitic Gentile faction of the Early Church in the ecumenical councils, which was mostly influenced by Paul. Why did he do that? Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians fond of the Jews tended to take the social justice and pacifisitic aspects of Christianity seriously, which complicated wedding Christian religious concepts to the "might makes right" political philosophy of Rome.

I'm only really familiar with the continental organization of the Church, I can't really speak to what the monastic tradition of the British Isles was like and how it differed from that, if at all.

Any good books to recommend? The development of Christianity fascinates me.

If you want to run through the entire development of the Christian religion, I'd go with the Deuteronimistic history/post-exile selections of the Hebrew Bible, i.e. Deuteronomy-Malachi--taking out Esther, Job, and the "Books of Solomon", i.e. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Sons--then the New Testament, Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, Josephus' work, The Confessions, The City of God, Summa Theologiae, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, The Large Catechism, The Book of Concord, On the Jews and Their Lies, and the Nag Hammadi Library, and Elaine Pagels' work on the Gnostic sects of Christianity.

Snaieke loves this guy: