If recent elections have taught us anything, it’s that young Americans
have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the
election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for
Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60 percent
of their vote.
Now Republicans have a plan to try to recapture
the youngest voters out there: Take over the curriculum in public
schools, replace education with a bunch of conservative propaganda, and
reap the benefits of having a new generation that can’t tell reality
from right-wing fantasy.
How well this plan will work is
debatable, but in the meantime, these shenanigans present the very real
possibility that public school students will graduate without a proper
education. To make it worse, many of these attempts to rewrite school
curriculum are happening in Texas,
by
simply wielding its power as one of the biggest school textbook markets
there is. With that in mind, here’s a list of 11 lies your kid may be
in danger of learning in school.
the
new social studies standards laid down by the right-wing-dominated
Texas State School Board and found them to be a deplorable example of
conservative wishful thinking replacing fact. At the top of list?
Downplaying the role that slavery had in starting the Civil War, and
instead focusing on “sectionalism” and “states’ rights,” even though the
sectionalism and states’ rights arguments directly stemmed from
Southern states wanting to keep slavery. There’s also a chance your kid
might be misled to think post-Civil War racism was no big deal, as the
standards excise any mention of the KKK, the phrase “Jim Crow” or the
Black Codes. Mention is made of the Southern Democratic opposition to
civil rights, but mysteriously, the mass defection of Southern Democrats
to the Republican Party to punish the rest of the Democrats for
supporting civil rights goes unmentioned.
Lie No. 2: Joe McCarthy was right.
The
red-baiting of the mid-20th century has gone down in history,
correctly, as a witch hunt that stemmed from irrational paranoia that
gripped the U.S. after WWII. But now, according to the Thomas B. Fordham
report, your kid might learn that the red baiters had a point: “It is
disingenuously suggested that the House Un-American Activities
Committee—and, by extension, McCarthyism—have been vindicated by the
Venona decrypts of Soviet espionage activities (which had, in reality,
no link to McCarthy’s targets).” Critical lessons about being skeptical
of those who attack fellow Americans while wrapping themselves in the
flag will be lost for students whose textbooks adhere to these
standards.
Lie No. 3: Climate change is a massive hoax scientists have perpetuated on the public.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has
been hard at work pushing for laws requiring that climate change
denialism be taught in schools as a legitimate scientific theory.
Unfortunately,
as Neela Banerjee of
the L.A. Times reports, they’ve already had some serious success:
“Texas and Louisiana have introduced education standards that require
educators to teach climate change denial as a valid scientific position.
South Dakota and Utah passed resolutions denying climate change.” Other
states are taking the “teach the controversy” strategy that helped get
creationism into biology classrooms, asking teachers to treat climate
change like it’s a matter of political debate instead of a
scientifically established fact.
The reality is that climate change is a fact that has overwhelming scientific consensus. In 2004, Science
reviewed the 928 relevant studies on
climate change published between 1993 and 2003 and found that exactly
zero of them denied that climate change was a reality, and most found it
had man-made causes. To claim that climate change is a “controversy”
requires one to believe that there’s a massive conspiracy involving
nearly all the scientists in the world. So, your kids are not only
not learning
the realities of climate change, they are also learning, if indirectly,
to give credence to conspiracy theory paranoia.
Lie No. 4: The Bible is a history textbook and a scientific document.
Texas
passed a law in 2007 pushing schools to teach the Bible as history and
literature in schools. Since that was already being done in most
schools, the law was clearly just a backdoor way to sneak religious
instruction into schools, and a report
by the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) demonstrates that
many of them have taken full advantage. One district treats the Bible
stories like history by “listing biblical events side by side with
historical developments from around the globe.” Many other schools are
teaching that the Bible “proves” that the Earth is only 6,000 years old.
The Earth is actually over 4 billion years old.
Lie No. 5: Black people are the descendants of Ham and therefore cursed by God.
Among
the courses justified by the 2007 Bible law, TFN found two school
districts teaching that the various races are descended from the sons of
Noah. All the Bible really says about the sons of Noah is that Ham was
cursed by his father so that his descendants would be slaves, but
American slave owners used this passage to claim that Africans must be
the descendants of Ham and therefore their slave-owning was OK by God.
Make no mistake. The only reason this legend has persisted and is
popping up in 21st-century classrooms is that conservative Christians
are still trying to justify the enslavement of African Americans over a
century ago.
Lie No. 6: Evolution is a massive hoax scientists have perpetuated on the public.
Creationists
have an endless store of creative ways to get around the Constitution
and the courts when it comes to replacing legitimate biology education
with fundamentalist Christian dogma. Various states have employed an
extensive school voucher system that has allowed creationist dogma to
flourish. College-age activist Zack Kopplin has been chronicling the
problem, and has found various schools nationwide using taxpayer dollars
to teach that evolution is a “mistaken belief” and that the Bible
“refutes the man-made idea of evolution.” Why do these school
administrators believe that scientists are hoaxing the public by making
up evolution? Kopplin found a Louisiana school principal who claimed
it’s because scientists are “sinful men” seeking to justify their own
immorality, and another Florida school teaching that evolutionary theory
is “the way of the heathen.”
Lie No. 7:
Sex is awful and filthy, and you should save it for someone you love.
While
things are improving, even in notoriously fact-phobic states like
Mississippi and Texas, “abstinence-only” education continues to persist
in school districts across the nation. TFN found that
nearly three-quarters of Texas high schools are still teaching abstinence-only,
which is based on the fundamental and easily disproved lie that
premarital sex is inherently dangerous to a person’s mental and physical
health. On top of this, TFN found that many schools are still passing
on inaccurate information on condoms and STI transmission, usually
exaggerating the dangers in a futile bid to keep kids from having sex.
Unfortunately, even Texas school districts that use curriculum that
educates correctly on contraception use are still trying to spin
abstinence-until-marriage as a desirable option for all students,
even though premarital sex is near-universal in the real world. Abstinence-only may be discredited with the voters, but sadly it’s still very normal in Texas, other red states, and
even across the nation.
Lie No. 8: Dragons actually once existed.
As much as “Game of Thrones” fans might wish otherwise, dragons are not real and have never existed.
But as reported by Mother Jones,
Louisiana’s notorious voucher school system has let some crazy nonsense
fly in the classroom, including the claim that dragons used to roam the
planet. A book being used in Louisiana classrooms titled ”Life Science”
and published by Bob Jones University Press claims that “scientists”
found “dinosaur skulls” that the book suggests are actually dragons.
“The large skull chambers could have contained special
chemical-producing glands. When the animal forced the chemicals out of
its mouth or nose, these substances may have combined and produced fire
and smoke,” the book claims.
Lie No. 9: Gay people do not actually exist.
After
being beat back by gay rights and sexual health advocates, Republicans
in the Tennessee Legislature are once again trying to bring back the
“don’t say gay bill.” The law
would ban a teacher from admitting the existence of homosexuality to
students prior to the 8th grade, even if the students ask them about
it. Instead, the bill would require turning a student who confesses to
being gay over to his parents, with the legislators clearly hoping that
punishment will somehow make the kid not-gay. The entire bill rests on
and promotes the premise that homosexuality isn’t a real sexual
orientation, but just the result of mental illness or confusion, and if
it’s enforced, that message will come across to the students.
Lie No. 10: Hippies were dirty, immoral Satan-worshippers.
In
the 1960s, it was common for conservatives to try to discredit the left
by stoking paranoia about hippie culture and denouncing the supposed
evils of rock ‘n’ roll. Forty years have passed, but in Louisiana, some
school administrators are apparently still afraid that possessing a
Beatles record means a young person is on the verge of quitting bathing
and taking up a lifestyle of taking LSD and worshiping Satan at
psychedelic orgies.
A history textbook snagged from a Louisiana school funded
by the voucher program tells students: “Many young people turned to
drugs and immoral lifestyles and these youths became known as hippies.
They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing,
and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music
played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence
over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to
Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.” It’s unclear if the
book also teaches that if you play a Queen record backward, you can
hear Satan telling you to smoke pot, but that kind of critical
information could also be conveyed during the teacher’s lectures on the
subject.
Lie No. 11: Ayn Rand’s books have literary value.
Idaho state Sen. John Goedde,
chairman of the state’s Senate Education Committee, has introduced a
bill that would require students not only to read Rand’s ponderous novel
“Atlas Shrugged,” but also to pass a test on it in order to graduate.
Goedde claims to mostly not be serious about this bill, but instead is
using it as a childish attempt to piss off the liberals, but it’s still
the sort of item parents need to watch out for.
After all, Texas textbook standards
require that an obsession with the gold standard be
taught as a legitimate economic theory instead of the mad ravings of
cranks that it is. We live in an era where no amount of right-wing
lunacy is considered too much to be pushed on innocent children like
it’s fact. Anyone who doubts that should just remember one word:
dragons.
If recent elections have taught us anything, it’s that young Americans
have taken a decided turn to the left. Young voters delivered Obama the
election: the under-44 set voted Obama and the over-45 set broke for
Romney. The youngest voters, age 18-29, gave Obama a whopping 60 percent
of their vote.
