The Federalist Party re-emerges victoriously.
Texas Department of Education drops Thomas Jefferson from their (nationally influential)Â curriculum.
Widely regarded as one of the most important of all the founding fathers of the United States, Thomas Jefferson received a demotion of sorts Friday thanks to the Texas Board of Education.
The board voted to enact new teaching standards for history and social studies that will alter which material gets included in school textbooks. It decided to drop Jefferson from a world history section devoted to great political thinkers.
According to Texas Freedom Network, a group that opposes many of the changes put in place by the Board of Education, the original curriculum asked students to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.”
That emphasis did not sit well with board member Cynthia Dunbar, who, during Friday’s meeting, explained the rationale for changing it. “The Enlightenment was not the only philosophy on which these revolutions were based,” Dunbar said. (Heh heh heh heh.)
The new standard, passed at the meeting in a 10-5 vote, now reads, “Explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone.”
By dropping mention of revolution, and substituting figures such as Aquinas and Calvin for Jefferson, Texas Freedom Network argues, the board had chosen to embrace religious teachings over those of Jefferson, the man who coined the phrase “separation between church and state.”
According to USA Today, the board also voted to strike the word “democratic” from references to the U.S. form of government, replacing it with the term “constitutional republic.” Texas textbooks will contain references to “laws of nature and nature’s God” in passages that discuss major political ideas.
It is a long time in coming, but really this partisan battle has been raging. The Federalist Party, assumed to have folded its tents in their embrace of James Monroe and the “Era of Good Feeling” after disgracing themselves at the ill-fated Hartford Convention, have re-emerged and taken their first scalp — the long time nemesis, Thomas Jefferson.
