Rethinking education: McLeroy, Texas, and historical perspective

Editor’s note: the end of this article contains implied use of vulgarities from other liberal writers who oppose American Clarity’s position. Tread carefully!

A short while ago, Don McLeroy and other Texas conservatives decided they’d had enough: liberal indoctrination of their children had been crossing boundaries for too many decades, teaching values which opposed the very foundations of conservatism.  And so one day, he and a band of other Texas school board members decided that Texas would be different.  They decided that Texas would spend class time talking about different aspects of American history than what had been considered adequate for decades.  Predictably, the backlash was vicious: the anger expressed by liberals has been predictably foul (by historical standards), and at times even terrifying.

So what exactly did McLeroy and his board do to cause all the rage?

In a short list from the liberal Huffinton Post, the Texan conservatives wanted to:

1) Teach about the values of the free market, and how America was intended to achieve economic success with less government intervention (see: The Wealth of Nations, written by an incredibly important historical figure whom liberals tend to forget, Adam Smith).

2) They didn’t want to spend as much time on one of our most humanistic (read: liberal) founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, and instead decided to discuss the speeches of Jefferson Davis–The President of the Confederacy, an important person in American history–alongside those of Abraham Lincoln.

3) They decided that John Calvin–one of the most profound and influential leaders of The Reformation–was important.

4) They wanted to call the United States a constitutional republic instead of “democratic.”

5) They didn’t want to spend time talking about Hip Hop.

6) They wanted to explain the decline in the dollar’s value, and how the gold standard was in effect until the 70’s.

7) They wanted to talk about the faith of some of the founding fathers (which, regardless of whether or not you agree with them, is history, and since thoughts affect actions, this doesn’t seem to be such a bad idea).

8) They wanted to say B.C. instead of B.C.E., the type of act which liberal board members ironically referred to as “white washing.”

9) They want to talk more about the right to bear arms, and how it isn’t for hunting.

Predictably, the word that liberal paper The Huffington Post used to describe these changes was “revisionist,” which is bizarre, considering that every single one of these historical happenings actually existed.  If conservatives were interested in teaching stories about how George Washington was given divine protection while fighting the Indians, the questionable evidence might lead us to believe conservatives were intending to create a mythological education for our students (although Washington himself documented his miraculous survival).  But the truth is that–if we have the original documents and history books from each era of American history–we should have no problem including the above list of aspects in our history curricula.  But yet we find the Left in violent opposition to the incorporation of foundational American history.  But why?

To be fair, McLeroy’s vision of America is a radically less liberal departure from what I was taught in the public school system, but should it necessarily be otherwise?  If liberals are so angry that Texas wants a more conservative approach to history, perhaps they shouldn’t be forcing liberal standards upon the children of conservatives.  Do unto others, it is said.  Unfortunately, this kind of tolerance for diversity isn’t commonplace amongst the Left: judging by the amount of hatred aroused, no school system should ever focus on anything other than the “true” aspects of American history which liberals themselves prefer.  Fortunately for anyone with a brain, this gives insight into what liberals define as historical truth.

First, what liberals mean by a “true” history of the United States isn’t actually a proportionate amount of historical happenings, but rather that we teach children primarily about America’s dirty laundry.  This same attitude can be seen in another liberal system–Hollywood–in their approach to things considered “real.”  When a sitcom or movie is referred to as being “real,” we can be guaranteed a dysfunctional family, a sexual perversion, or a Harmony Korine film.  In short, “real” means “wrong.”

One such example, Howard Zinn’s college staple A People’s History of the United States is a favorite of indoctrinated youths, a collection of historical stories from minority/liberal positions, intended to make the reader ashamed of the history of the United States of America.  Granted, the stories contained within Zinn’s book may be historical happenings, but the very attempt to create a perspective on the historical happenings suggests that a perspective must be taken, and that it must be the one liberals personally prefer.  But if all historical learning must take place from a particular perspective, then it would seem fair to let people in different states with different perspectives determine their viewpoint for themselves.  Since the left seems to feel that other US minority cultures deserve their own historical perspective, shouldn’t our next logical step lead toward historical liberty for the many diverse US majority cultures?  Or are all white people the same?

Second, “real” means “only pertaining to Leftist causes.”   And my three years in the US college system confirmed this truth: I learned little about the actual foundations of our country, and even less about American heritage, philosophy, or truly American economics.  The majority of my time, sad as it is to say, was spent on liberal topics such as the following:

-How Columbus was a murderer, and the natives he killed were noble.  This was a topic which was repeatedly discussed in multiple classes.  Not one word was spoken about how disturbingly primitive and vicious the neighbor-sacrificing Aztecs and Incas were.

-How Zheng He was actually the “discoverer” of North America, and Columbus should not be the focus of our study.  I spent months in multiple classes covering the banal minutia of Zheng He’s fleet, and very little was taught about Columbus’s other non-murderous deeds.

-How corporations were responsible for manufacturing gingivitis so they could sell toothpaste.

-Slavery and Jim Crow laws, as if we had to know every detail.  In my history classes, I had to read an entire book on the 1960’s (which I still have to this day), and next to nothing about “unimportant” things like The Federalist Papers, The Wealth of Nations, or Common Sense (full texts included in these links).

-One professor of mine spent days of class time talking about the normalcy of homosexuality, and had entire days devoted to public speaking by homosexuals about homosexuality.  I didn’t learn that gays comprise half of AIDS cases (even though they represent a very small portion of the US population), or about homosexuals struggling with drug/alcohol abuse or depression/suicide until long after college.

-Another professor spent a serious amount of class time having the students watch the Vagina Monologues, a series of speeches about how vaginas emote; and another portion of our semester interviewing a transsexual wearing a zebra-printed jacket, who wore a chihuahua on his arm  (he was dressed like a woman).

-Throughout multiple classes, I was given examples of other “significant” cultures around the globe which–unsurprisingly–treated the following behaviors as normal: homosexuality/gender-bending (berdaches), abortion (the Kalahari !Kung), and free sex/illegitimate childbirth/venereal disease.  The implied perspective was that we should feel as though the world provides us with good company, since other people do these things too.

-We also studied how some chimps (such as the bonobo) use sexuality as a form of bonding, and we studied in great detail how their sexual acts resembled many of “ours,” which is why my professors said we should be comfortable expressing our sexualities.  When we studied the war-like tendencies of apes, suddenly primate behavior became wrong.

In short, my parents spent a lot of money so that I could be turned into a liberal, something which would infuriate liberals if conservatives the tables around, by indoctrinating the children of liberals to be conservatives.  By the time I had left college, I was a self-proclaimed agnostic socialist, ashamed of my white heritage, and incapable of figuring out whether or not I even existed (although that problem was more my philosophy professor’s fault).  Despite the massive amounts of money invested in my education, I didn’t even learn that the Bill of Rights wasn’t originally applicable in the states.  And this, my friends, is not an education, and it is not fair to everyone involved.  Especially people who live in a part of the country which doesn’t hold the same aspects of American History to be foundational, and who legally define themselves as states for the purpose of engineering their societies to reflect the character of their people.

McLeroy was also right when he wanted to discuss some of the problems of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s: we saw the birth of all kinds of welfare ghettos and entitlement mentality, and a loss in liberty rights the US had not previously seen.  To pretend that the Civil Rights movement was entirely positive reeks of partisan bias, a bias which the Left is more than happy to “out” when conservatives talk about the founding fathers.  Martin Luther King Jr, while contributing in some ways to the purity of the American Dream, was not our Lord and Savior, nor our Dear Leader: he was a flawed human being leading an imperfect movement.  And Jefferson Davis, regardless of whether some think the Civil War was only about racism, had taken many other non-slavery-related stances which echoed the original plan for the United States of America.  Say what you will, but when your country decides to split in two, its citizens should probably know why.

Furthermore, while the Civil Rights movement is an incredibly important piece of American history (it would break my heart to see one of my black coworkers have to drink from another fountain), it isn’t everything, and we don’t need to devote most of our semester to it.  And the abolition of abusive slavery, while certainly being a high point in American history, is not the moral pinnacle of American existence.  And despite how culturally important the Left finds the Hip Hop “movement,” Hip Hop has done nothing more for the black community than reinforcing negative stereotypes: surely if the Left wants to show black contributions to Americans, Hip Hop can’t be one of them.   And even if Hip Hop were positive, why would they spend valuable class time–the amount of class time McLeroy’s opponents recognized as inadequate–discussing it?  Because to the sillier portions of the Left, learning about Flavor Flav is more important than knowing who John Calvin is, and more important than what happened to our currency after abandoning the gold standard. If to the Left, Hip Hop is a crucial part of American history and something worth sharing with children, maybe the Left shouldn’t be in charge of teaching our children.

Another complaint lodged against McLeroy is his stance on abstinence-only education, which liberals consider offensive because they believe that all children should know how to have sex before they’re allowed to drive cars.  But this isn’t very fair: if parents in a community believe that having sex out of wedlock is wrong, they should be allowed to take a stance against sexual indoctrination they find offensive.  Following in the footsteps of the liberal UN and our school system, The Girl Scouts have recently been caught secluding girls from their parents during seminars, and teaching them how to have various forms of sex… on drugs.  And then the girls are taught how to get abortions.  Could America at least recognize that this form of teaching is a leftist imposition of morality upon people who might find it wrong?  Is the left completely inconsiderate of other cultures?

Now, the left has been complaining because Texas sets the standards for a lot of the textbooks in our nation, since Texas is such a large buyer, and publishing companies tend to cater to the large buyers.  This, they say, will impact the education of children in more liberal states.  But if liberal states want textbooks which cover other aspects of American History, or if they want less scientific theories about the origins of mankind, then–I’m going out on a limb, here–perhaps there will be someone who wants to make money by catering to more liberal states.  If there’s a demand, and people have the liberty to establish their own standards, someone will supply.  And if Texan students show themselves to be horribly educated, then Texas will suffer.  And what’s wrong with that?  

But the largest and most serious uproar occurred because McLeroy is a proponent of Intelligent Design, which through methodological naturalism challenges the theory of evolution based upon scientific evidence (and also acknowledges some of natural selection’s serious flaws which Darwin recognized, and admittedly could not explain). The silliest aspect of this upset is the fact that his state’s curriculum demands that people teach the “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories, but when McLeroy decided to apply this useful and reasonable stance to the theory of macro-evolution, suddenly the board found themselves violently opposed to intellectual balance.

If liberals are so sure that the theory of evolution is rock-solid, then they should have no problem devoting a couple of class sessions to discussing the theory of Intelligent Design, and then pointing kids to further reading if the kids are interested.  If the theory of evolution is scientifically valid and Intelligent Design is not (read: if), Intelligent Design will not last long, as non-science should.  But rather, the macro-evolutionary indoctrinated Left has allowed their preoccupation with philosophical–meaning, unscientific–prejudices to keep students from studying a controversy which will likely impact them in one way or another.  After all, the belief in either anti-Biblical evolution or theistic design will have a profound impact upon a person’s behavior.  This what terrifies the Left about Intelligent Design: the implications, not the science.

This brings me to my final point.  The behavior of the anti-McLeroy crowd shows that they are in no position to lead children.  Ironically, his opponents hate his view of education because he supposedly supports things which are “morally bankrupt,” but if we take a close look at their tolerant and enlightened value system, what we find is nothing less than disturbing.  From his Facebook fan page:

“Don, are you an educator? Do you have any background in history, such as a degree, or any experience in the field of history, or are you just some loud-mouthed right-wing, white supremacist? I mean, putting the words of a traitor like Jefferson Davis next to those of Abraham Lincoln?”

“********************************************************************!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! **** YOU DON **** YOU DON **** YOU DON **** YOU DON **** YOU DON **** YOU DON”

“**** YOU DON!!!! Don’t ruin our education system.”

“HEY HOWE ABOUT * U”

“stay away from the children, you insane ****. go stick your head back in the sand.”

“I have to invent a new word to describe Don McLeroy… “****tard.” School textbooks don’t suck enough, he has to **** on them some more and make another generation of Americans even more stupid about science and history. And he’s so damn proud of himself…”

“Hey Don. I didnt know the NAZI party had a following in Texas.”

“I applaud the things you stand for, and worked hard to preserve in this country. And I appreciate the work you did on the SBOE for Texas and our nation. The Liberals want to re-write history to eliminate the values they want to get rid of, that our country was founded upon, and we must continue to do all we can to prevent their success. Thank you for standing strong against them. We can’t give up on the battle now!”

-Response #1: “what battle, oleta? are you planning on blowing up a federal building like your other hero timothy mcveigh? GET BACK IN YOUR CRATE!”

-Response #2: Oh those values- Slave owning…Only males with land voting values. read the true history of america. History is one thing you freakish right wing nazi conservaties cannot control.”

Anna H. Janis (an 80+ year-old woman): “Hope this works. I am just learning. I want to be a fan. Let me know I did this right.”

-Response  #1: “You a ****ing stupid Anna. Crawl into a hole and never come out.”

-Response #2: “sorry anna, it didn’t work. you should delete your profile and start from scratch. don’t think about it, just do it right now.”

Andrew Leising: “I’m wishing him and his family the worst. Hopefully he gets into a car accident on his way to work”

If this is the kind of thinking that our educational system is producing, perhaps it’s time for a change anyway.

This entry was posted on 29. March 2010 at 18:24 and is filed under cultural/racial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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