posted March 18, 2010 12:31 AM         

Why is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?
By Matthew Crow
Matthew Crow is a PhD candidate at UCLA and a contributor to the History News Service.

Who’s afraid of Thomas Jefferson? Lots and lots of people, apparently. Jefferson argued that unless there was a just distribution of goods and institutional structures for every citizen to actively participate in public decision making, the country would be headed “downhill” in the wake of the American Revolution. After decades of oversimplified, if understandable, disputes among historians and the public about the importance of studying the figures who we traditionally call “Founding Fathers,” the Texas Board of Education has turned the world upside down.

In their revision of a report by social studies teachers, board members recently decided to cut Thomas Jefferson from the list of historical figures whose thought influenced or expressed political revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By doing so, the board has solved the widespread perception of a democratic deficit in Western countries today with an educational scheme that won’t suffer the people to actively ask what calling ourselves a democratic society might demand of us as citizens.

At the time of this writing, the plan of the board is to replace Jefferson with John Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, and William Blackstone. Especially in light of the prevalence of religious fervor today and the consequent growth of writing religious history, Calvin is actually the most timely and interesting suggestion. He should have been on the list anyway, provided we include outbursts of revolutionary politics before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like the Dutch Revolt, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

more on the link.

i have to agree that all these guys should have been in there already! but i find this scary. jwhop started talking about jefferson being a deist. ???

posted March 18, 2010 01:09 AM         

I agree they should all be represented.

Creationists might be unsettled in Texas...
does Deism - a so called natural religion threaten other views?
Obviously he is threatening in some way maybe he was *gasp* too progressive.. I have to read your link tomorrow.

thanks for the post

posted March 18, 2010 10:52 AM         

i find this interesting

"Jefferson argued that unless there was a just distribution of goods and institutional structures for every citizen to actively participate in public decision making, the country would be headed “downhill” in the wake of the American Revolution..."

in light of the fact that we are repeatedly told by conservatives that obama is a marxist who wants to destroy the original intentions of the founding "fathers"...the "just distribution of goods and institutions" ensuring that EVERYONE has a fair shake, basically, sounds eerily like that "evil" wish of obama's to redistribute the wealth in a fairer manner...maybe JEFFERSON WAS A COMMIE?? and the constitution was never meant to protect big business in hoarding the capital??

posted March 19, 2010 09:58 AM         

Crow is put forth as a PhD candidate. If the rest of his writing and dissertation is as content empty as this rant there's only a few graduate schools in America which would award him a PhD. Perhaps at Leftist U.

"Jefferson argued that unless there was a just distribution of goods and institutional structures for every citizen to actively participate in public decision making, the country would be headed “downhill” in the wake of the American Revolution."

As usual, leftists....Marxists, Socialists, Progressives manage to get it wrong.

A just distribution of goods and services has nothing to do with a "welfare state" but rather demands that those who use their hands, minds, hearts and dreams not have the fruits of their labors stolen from them to redistribute to the indolent, the lazy, the shiftless, the moochers, the slackers and the rest of the "something for nothing crowd".

"A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."
Thomas Jefferson

"institutional structures for every citizen to actively participate in public decision making"

Ummm katatonic, we have these "institutional structures" for every citizen of voting age to participate in "public decision making".

Ummm katatonic, we call this voting and we exercise this function when we vote in city, county, state and federal elections.

Apparently, the English language taxes your abilities katatonic.

I talked about the illusion that Jefferson was a Deist.

No Deist would attend church services...in the main chamber of the House of Representatives almost every Sunday of his 2 term Presidency AND permit other religious denominations to use federal buildings for their church services. Nor would a Deist use the following words in any declaration...let alone the Declaration of Independence.

Natures God
their Creator
Supreme Judge of the World
divine Providence

These are not the words of a Deist who believes God created and then lost interest in his creation or went away to let the world sort itself out, by itself.

posted March 19, 2010 12:46 PM         

however despite your argument that jefferson believed we should regulate ourselves, which i actually agree with, your own quote from him says

"shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

this morning on the radio i heard about a class action suit against HOOTERS of all people, because they have violated at LEAST california labour law (designed to protect the "mouth of labor" from employers who do NOT regulate themselves) in making employees work off the clock, pay for their own uniforms and even allow the company to shave off part of their tips...

though this ALSO protects labour from having its bread stolen it was necessary to enact regulatory laws to compel employers to treat their "labor" honestly and fairly. why is that? could it be that COMPLETELY FREE enterprise thinks it can carry on as it likes and treat its employees basically as possessions who should do as told whether fair or not? heavens forbid, not in honest old america right? think again.

the free market sounds great, jwhop. intellectually i am all for it...but it doesn't exist. capital without restraints has been PROVEN to shaft the employee every time it gets a chance. it has had 240 years to prove otherwise and failed abjectly.

posted March 19, 2010 01:00 PM         

Free Market Capitalists understand that employees in the work force have freedom of choice as to whom they work for and they will go where the grass is greener.

I'll take Ann Coulter's credentials to express an opinion over those of the lame-brained Crow any day.

"Ann Coulter is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers — Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assualt on America (January, 2009), If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (October, 2007); Godless: The Church of Liberalism (June 2006); How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)(October, 2004); Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (June 2003); Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (June 2002); and High Crimes and Misdemeanors:The Case Against Bill Clinton (August 1998).

Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate.

She is a frequent guest on many TV shows, including The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Hannity and Colmes, The Glen Beck Show, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, and has been profiled in numerous publications, including TV Guide, the Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper's Bazaar, and Elle magazine. She was the April 25, 2005 cover story of Time magazine.

In 2001, Coulter was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner in 2001.

A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

Coulter clerked for the Honorable Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and was an attorney in the Department of Justice Honors Program for outstanding law school graduates.

posted March 19, 2010 01:18 PM         

just the other day you included henry ford in a list of progressives (equating progressives with socialists)...the man who had the outrageous idea that paying his workers decently would make a stronger company.

posted March 19, 2010 01:26 PM         

Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
Published: March 12, 2010

AUSTIN, Tex. — After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

Mary Helen Berlanga accused fellow members of the Board of Education of “rewriting history.”

Changing Standards in Texas
Related
How Christian Were the Founders? (February 14, 2010)
The Lede Blog: Textbooks a Texas Dentist Could Love (March 12, 2010) The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Republicans on the board voting for it.

The board, whose members are elected, has influence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buyers of textbooks. In the digital age, however, that influence has diminished as technological advances have made it possible for publishers to tailor books to individual states.

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

“Republicans need a little credit for that,” he said. “I think it’s going to surprise some students.”

Mr. Bradley won approval for an amendment saying students should study “the unintended consequences” of the Great Society legislation, affirmative action and Title IX legislation. He also won approval for an amendment stressing that Germans and Italians as well as Japanese were interned in the United States during World War II, to counter the idea that the internment of Japanese was motivated by racism.

Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include “how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.” The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.

Mavis B. Knight, a Democrat from Dallas, introduced an amendment requiring that students study the reasons “the founding fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring the government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion above all others.”

It was defeated on a party-line vote.

After the vote, Ms. Knight said, “The social conservatives have perverted accurate history to fulfill their own agenda.”

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Terri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders.

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Even the course on world history did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cynthia Dunbar, a lawyer from Richmond who is a strict constitutionalist and thinks the nation was founded on Christian beliefs, managed to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures whose writings inspired revolutions in the late 18th century and 19th century, replacing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone. (Jefferson is not well liked among conservatives on the board because he coined the term “separation between church and state.”)

“The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Ms. Dunbar said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

*********

posted March 19, 2010 05:13 PM         

Which says allot about my own bias[es]

Conservatism is not the bogeyman, but when you add in religious dogma and creationist views you are a half step away
from
Darwin book burning making a come back.

Is this the only way to relieve the stress of change?
Some people need more sex or higher quality sex.
Not OxyContin, not Vicodin
Nor placing further restrictions on learning to the point where you are controlling thought.

This makes me angry. I recognized some of the names in Kat's post and they share the views of Religious extremist Michelle Bachman [R- MN] when you search: wing-nut;

posted March 19, 2010 05:39 PM         

I went back to school "late" as they say. I have had some odd jobs.
Also I have worked in the Restaurant world for years now. White table cloth places mostly, but also some real cockroaches. If you do not have the education about employee rights or state and local law you can and will be taken advantage of.

I went nose to nose with a restaurant manager or two, and owners.
No one was allowed to take advantage of my people. They always try.
I know the bottom line is important.
When the hood fans go down in the summer and the ambient temp behind the line is over 120 degrees [not next to a flat top mind you].. It always happens on a friday or a sat night.

posted March 19, 2010 07:12 PM         

Progressivism

Brought to you by the denizens of Mensa and Glen Beck [resident conservative libertarian]:

luv the chalk board

posted March 20, 2010 07:12 PM         

"Jefferson argued that unless there was a just distribution of goods and institutional structures for every citizen to actively participate in public decision making, the country would be headed “downhill” in the wake of the American Revolution..."

Because in my studying him, I never came across this. Though I get the vague feeling that this is actually something out of context.

Though the founding fathers were not of one belief and argued a lot, finally settling--very grudgingly and with bitterness--on some issues.

Even Abigail Adams threatened to inspire a rebellion of women if women weren't given equality. She also wanted the abolition of slavery (such as Jefferson's) and racial equality. Unfortunately, that didn't happen and neither did her rebellion.

I have often wondered if Jefferson and Abigail had an affair, though. It was obvious to me that Jefferson at least respected her opinions if nothing else, even if he did keep slaves despite Abigail's objections.

posted March 21, 2010 08:40 AM         

Now, leftists in the teachers unions, NEA and Federal Teachers Association and other slimy Socialist groups are whining, stamping their feet, sucking their thumbs, screeching and shrieking in unison that Texas school children are going to begin...for the first time to hear the real history of Texas and the United States.

TS babies.

It will take a generation to undo all the damage done to education by these lying bums. Further, the education system is skewed so far left these changes in the textbooks of Texas won't come close to balancing the equation....but it's a damned good start and a start in the right place; textbooks.

posted March 21, 2010 10:57 AM         

not being a texan schoolchild or parent i have no idea how warped their curriculum is.

your post basically confirms that you have no problem with overprotective government as long as it spits in the eye of your "opponent"...how spiteful is that? and how two-faced?

let me point out that by that logic you should bloody well sit down and shut up while the country has it's "balance" after 8 years of idiocy - and far worse.

did you know that texas being such a LARGE market influences what other states get for textbooks too? tho i hear that damage is minimal since regulations have recently changed in the textbook field giving more options.

posted March 21, 2010 11:02 AM         

we may never know! oh i forgot - they must be trespassers since they are not acknowledged by the white peeps of texas..