Conservatiever onderwijs in Texas (en daarbuiten?)

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Texas is een van de grootste staten op de schoolboekenmarkt.
De invloed zal dus waarschijnlijk over de staatsgrenzen voelbaar zijn.

En 'In contrast, the Texas board’s description of America as a
“Judeo-Christian” nation treats ideas and events that have been under
continual reinterpretation and revision for decades as literal and
settled truth.'

Maar ook 'It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children —
not, as in the past, college students — whose minds are being fought
over today on such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of
increasingly bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a
collective identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas
about the true character of the country and the true meaning of democracy.'

Groet / Cees

Conservatiever onderwijs in Texas
http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1013/Buitenland/article/detail/485221/2010/05/22/Conservatiever-onderwijs-in-Texas.dhtml
AUSTIN - De Texaanse Onderwijsraad heeft vrijdag een nieuw conservatief
onderwijsprogramma goedgekeurd. De vijf miljoen schoolkinderen in de
zuidelijke Amerikaanse staat krijgen te maken met het aangepaste
onderwijs tijdens de lessen geschiedenis en maatschappijleer. Dat
meldden Amerikaanse media.

Door het nieuwe curriculum wordt kinderen in Texas de komende jaren
onder meer geleerd dat de Verenigde Naties een bedreiging voor de
soevereiniteit van de VS kunnen zijn. Door de oprichting van het
Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag en het aannemen van verdragen bij de
VN kan de individuele vrijheid van de Amerikanen beperkt worden, aldus
de conservatieve Republikeinse leden van de Onderwijsraad.

Ook zal er geen aandacht besteed worden aan de geschiedenis van Latino's
in de VS. De rassenscheiding tussen Mexicanen en Amerikanen in de
Texaanse klaslokalen in de vorige eeuw zal ook niet aan de orde komen.
Na veel gesteggel is besloten om de tweede naam van president Barack
Obama, Hussein, niet te gebruiken in de schoolboeken wegens de
associatie met het Midden-Oosten. Republikeinen hadden op het gebruik
van de tweede naam aangedrongen.

Critici stellen dat het onderwijsprogramma in Texas veel te conservatief
is geworden. Ook vinden zij dat het onderwijs te veel beïnvloed wordt
door de politiek. De Republikeinen vinden echter dat het programma weer
recht wordt getrokken, na jarenlange Democratische invloed op de
Onderwijsraad. (ANP)
22/05/10 02u34
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/education/22texas.html
May 22, 2010
Texas Approves Textbook Changes
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUSTIN, Tex., (AP) — The State Board of Education on Friday adopted new
social studies and history guidelines with a conservative bent for Texas
primary school classrooms.

The standards lay out how political events and figures will be taught to
about 4.8 million schoolchildren in Texas and beyond for the next
decade. They were adopted after a final showdown by two 9-to-5 votes
along party lines, after Democrats’ and moderate Republicans’ efforts to
delay a final vote failed.

The standards, which have prompted national debate, will be used by
publishers who often develop materials for other states based on those
passed in Texas.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/weekinreview/21tanenhaus.html
March 19, 2010
In Texas Curriculum Fight, Identity Politics Leans Right
By SAM TANENHAUS

The social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas Board of
Education, which will put a conservative stamp on textbooks, was
received less as a pedagogical document than as the latest provocation
in America’s seemingly endless culture wars.

“Why Is Texas Afraid of Thomas Jefferson?” the History News Network
asked, referring to the board’s recommendation that Jefferson, who
coined the expression “separation of church and state,” be struck from
the list of world thinkers who inspired 18th- and 19th-century revolutions.

Other critics were more direct: “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely,
History,” was the headline of an online column for The San Francisco
Chronicle.

This reaction wasn’t altogether surprising. The board’s wrangling over
the curriculum had been a spectacle for months, not least because its
disputes mirrored those taking place across the nation. In
mid-September, citizens showed up with firearms at tumultuous town hall
meetings on health care reform, and the Tea Party movement emerged as
the vehicle of conservative insurgents.

The majority on the Texas board, who are also conservatives, seemed to
be filtering these protests into their deliberations — in the proposal,
for instance, that students be instructed in “the individual right to
keep and bear arms; and an individual’s protection of private property
from government takings.”

Liberals — on the Texas board and beyond — detected an attempt to
force-feed children conservative dogma, whether it was the putative
religiosity of the nation’s founders, the historic contribution of the
Moral Majority and Rush Limbaugh, or the elevation of John Wayne into
the pantheon of patriotic heroes.

In reality, this controversy is the latest version of a debate that
reaches back many decades and is perhaps essential in a heterogeneous
democracy whose identity has long been in flux.

In the 18th century, the American writer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,
himself an immigrant from France, catalogued the continent’s bewildering
mix of “English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes.” He
wondered, “What then is the American, this new man?”

He concluded that in America, “individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men.”

That idea was later fortified by Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept of
American exceptionalism, which suggested that the country was exempt
from the bitter conflicts — class, religion, imperial ambition — that
had convulsed Europe.

Long afterward, amid America’s own convulsions in the 1960s and ’70s,
the concept of a single “race of men” looked outmoded. Didn’t race mean
“white race”? And didn’t “men” exclude women? American exceptionalism
might really be a form of cultural insularity.

So, universities and colleges devised new programs that prompted
objections as fierce as those now being made to the Texas curriculum.

In 1968, when Harvard students demanded a black studies program,
“Faculty hawks warned of the fall of Harvard, and even civilization, as
they knew it,” as Morton Keller and Phyllis Keller note in “Making
Harvard Modern.”

Soon an ever widening range of subjects, from gay studies to feminist
legal theory and anthropology, were added, in keeping with the dictates
of identity politics. Some of this thinking eventually filtered to grade
schools, with children now celebrating Kwanzaa and composing essays,
year after year, on the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Many of the changes were liberating, but some were narrowing and
erroneous — for instance the theories espoused by Leonard Jeffries Jr.,
who, as head of City College’s black studies department in the 1980s,
lectured on the differences between African “sun people” and European
“ice people.”

Meanwhile, conservatives like William Bennett and Lynne Cheney defended
syllabuses limited to the Western classics, and the liberal historian
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that attacks on the “Eurocentric
curriculum,” as some called it, were giving rise to “the notion that
history and literature should be taught not as disciplines but as
therapies whose function is to raise minority self-esteem.”

In fact, Mr. Schlesinger maintained, these new courses of study might
actually disserve minority students. “If a Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan
wanted to use the schools to disable and handicap black Americans, he
could hardly come up with anything more effective than the ‘Afrocentric’
curriculum,” Mr. Schlesinger wrote.

Though its authors say the Texas curriculum reinforces American
traditions, it may instead reflect the conservative variant of identity
politics, and this could invite a similar backlash.

To be fair, some of the board’s recommendations aren’t controversial.
Most scholars of the cold war, left and right, think that the Venona
documents — communications that record the activities of Americans who
secretly spied for the Soviet Union — illuminate the anti-Communist
investigations of the McCarthy period. And historians of the
conservative movement will agree that Rush Limbaugh and Phyllis Schlafly
are worth learning about, as are the Moral Majority and the National
Rifle Association.

Even the Texas curriculum’s most disputed item — its assertion that the
Founders envisioned America as a divinely inspired Christian nation — is
not as radical as it sounds.

In 1964, in a series of lectures on America’s founding documents,
starting with the Mayflower Compact, the political scientist Willmoore
Kendall theorized that “the nascent society that interprets itself in
the Compact is in some sense a religious, more specifically a Christian,
society, which calls God in as witness to its act of founding.”

Mr. Kendall teased out the implications through close readings of the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers.
But his analysis stressed the “symbolic” aspects of those texts, and his
nuanced discussion drew on counterarguments by other scholars.

In contrast, the Texas board’s description of America as a
“Judeo-Christian” nation treats ideas and events that have been under
continual reinterpretation and revision for decades as literal and
settled truth.

It is telling, too, that it is secondary-school children — not, as in
the past, college students — whose minds are being fought over today on
such a scale. This suggests that after so many years of increasingly
bitter polarization, Americans stand on the brink of a collective
identity crisis and no longer share a set of common ideas about the true
character of the country and the true meaning of democracy.

In “The American Political Tradition,” published in 1948, the historian
Richard Hofstadter suggested that the fad for popular history at the
time was evidence of “national nostalgia” — an effort not to understand
the past, but rather to evade the present. “This quest for the American
past is carried on in a spirit of sentimental appreciation rather than
of critical analysis,” he surmised.

As it happens, a good deal of contemporary popular history is more
critical than in Mr. Hofstadter’s day. But it is presented through an
ever-narrowing aperture.

The late Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States,” depicts
the United States as an epic of oppression in which the privileged abuse
the downtrodden. Conversely, “A Patriot’s History of the United States,”
by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, describes the New Deal as a
calamity that wreaked havoc on the American economy.

The two books seem to have captured the spirit of the moment; both are
on The New York Times best-seller list. Both are also, in effect,
counternarratives. They seek not to revise but to displace more familiar
histories and are utterly different in tone from older popular histories
like the Daniel Boorstin trilogy “The Americans,” and William
Manchester’s two-volume work, “The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative
History of America.”

For all their dissimilarities, Mr. Boorstin and Mr. Manchester convey
the impression that America, despite its diversity, is a nation whose
citizens share the same essential values, at once democratic and
aspirational. But to read these newer books is to inhabit two utterly
different Americas that have almost nothing to say to each other. Both
are conceived in a spirit of protest, and this explains their appeal at
a time when protest seems the most dynamic force in politics.

Half a century ago, in his essay, “The Search for Southern Identity,”
the historian C. Vann Woodward explored a parallel phenomenon, the
confusion that overtook the South after the Supreme Court had
invalidated segregation and the region become more urban and industrial,
losing its distinctive agrarian flavor.

What Southerners should do, Mr. Woodward urged, is subordinate their
regional attachment to the country’s “national myths,” for instance the
American “success story” that had inspired so many others, like the
European immigrants who had “sought and found identity in them.”

Southerners might do this, too, if they gave up “the romantic dreams of
the South’s past.”

Today it is not regional or ethnic identity, but ideological commitment
that threatens to submerge larger “national myths.” But one thing
remains unchanged from 50 or 60 years ago. As Americans struggle to see
where they are going, they continue to gaze fondly at the past — and to
see in it what they like.

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********