The Texas Board of Education is a powerful institution, Texas being a large market for School Textbooks nationwide, textbook makers write toward their standards.  So, they hold the nation hostage.  And thus we get this:

The first draft for proposed standards in United States History Studies Since Reconstruction says students should be expected “to identify significant conservative advocacy organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.”

Gingrich helped lead House Republicans to their 1994 takeover of Congress and became House speaker. Schlafly founded the conservative Eagle Forum and became a leading opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment aimed at formalizing women’s equality with men. The Moral Majority formed in the late 1970s as an evangelical Christian organization that influenced politics and public policy for decades. […]

Whether students will also be exposed to liberal examples from the ebb and flow of American politics is hard to predict. Conservatives form the largest bloc on the 15-member State Board of Education, whose partisan makeup is 10 Republicans and five Democrats. […]

But Mercer said he also would include the liberal National Education Association, MoveOn.org, Planned Parenthood and the Texas Freedom Network a group that says it promotes “religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the radical right.”

Two reviewers have recommended that Cesar Chavez, the late farm workers union leader, be removed from history books because they deem him an unworthy role model.

Anyway, the Culture War continues in the comments section of these stories.  See here:

Good to hear that there is some leaning to the right, but our kids need to know how liberals have corrupted any morals and values in this country and stood for everything which is against the traditional family. Hopefully there will be a stall or ban on all the desensitizing our children to the horrid sex and crime that our media so projects as being the norm. May God bless America again.

Also there’s this statement of where this is leading us:
Children have stopped growing taller (the average height of Americans has remained static for fifty years while Europeans have grown six inches) as the standard of healthcare and basic diet declines.

 I’ve stated this before on this blog before I know (though with four digits worth of blog posts it’d be hard for anyone to remember), but I was  impressed by the way my Literature textbook evaded the mention of “homosexual” in a quick write-up for Oscar Wilde  (for “The Importance of Being Earnest”) in describing legal troubles due to “flamboyance”.

As for Newt Gingrich’s place in history — well, he deserves a sentence or two in that thousand page book of finely tuned turgid, I suppose.  Intertwined in those two sentences is that explanation on why he only lasted four years as Speaker.

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