Part two of the interview will be up at the end of the week. Effie suggested that I talk about whatever’s floating around in my head, so…

The Texas Curriculum Massacre

Where to start? It’s times like these that not even a facepalm can adequately express my annoyance and exasperation with the state of Texas. I’ll let Picard and Riker express it for me:

The white-washing of Texas curriculum is downright horrific, as well as racist and sexist. If conservatives want to give their children a well-rounded education, ADD in different perspectives, but don’t cut anything out. The goal of Social Studies is to teach students how to take many opposing pieces of information, and to determine what is important, and what is superfluous, and to make a decision based on those facts. Removing opposing viewpoints will only harm developing minds, and will leave students unable to think critically when based with conflicting facts.

The impact that African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, women, etc. have had on our history, our culture, our politics, our economy, has been huge, and to ignore these contributions is downright ignorant. And how better to understand what is going on today, than by understanding the impact that different groups have had over the course of our history? To understand gay rights, we need to not only understand the Christian background of our founding fathers, but also the struggle for human rights that have been faced by all minority groups at different times in our history.

Furthermore, minorities and women are on the lower end of civic efficacy. Removing women and minority positive role models who have made a different on the national, state, and community level is a further attack against these groups. Who are our children going to hold up as role models, if we don’t give them responsible figures in the classroom? I’m not asking for George Lopez, I’m asking for Cesar Chavez.

And what’s going on with the hate on Thomas Jefferson? Church and state SHOULD be separate, for the protection of all different people. We see what happens in a theocracy–the rights of minority groups are trampled on in often vicious ways. It’s unacceptable. Jefferson was a brilliant man who was the primary author of many of our founding documents. The elimination of him from the curriculum is dangerous and troubling– for people who demand that we stick to a strict interpretation of the Constitution–they hate one of the writers of said document a great deal.

And that whole Arizona law that prohibits Latino studies? Don’t get me started. Again, promoting tolerance and diversity in the classroom? Empowering traditionally vulnerable students with low self-efficacy and low civic efficacy? OH THE HORROR.

They just don’t want Hispanic children growing up thinking that they can make a difference in their communities and government. Keep the white people in power, and the Hispanics suppressed, both politically and culturally.

Diversity makes us stronger. Diversity has made us an amazing country, where people from across the world come to start a better life. Diversity has given us a thousand viewpoints, a thousand different narratives from which we can study our country. We should be celebrating it, not rewriting history, not suppressing those stories, or ignoring them.

We are made better by our differences.

Advertisement