Look sharp, Texas kids, your new pro-conservative textbooks are almost ready

[Brainwashing to keep the kids stupid and working for peanuts. - Bozo]
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Rss@dailykos.com (hunter)
Saturday, September 20, 2014, 7:15 pm
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Sorry kids, you're screwed.

Tuesday saw a contentious public hearing on Texas's new proposed school textbooks, the ones that are required to adhere to 2010-established state standards set by a State Board of Education populated by hard-right conservatives and drafted with the help of such luminaries as conservative "historian" David Barton. The resulting crop of rewritten textbooks are in, and while the experts and others had some mighty harsh words for those results, the Board will be picking from this crop of textbooks this November, probably with precious few edits in the meantime. Shall we take a look?
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From Pearson, one of the most dominant textbook publishers, comes a social science textbook that sounds like a fine choice for Texas schoolchildren. Learn 'em up right, it will.
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In the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. taxes are 'what we pay for civilized society.' Society does not appear to be much more civilized today than it was when Justice Holmes made that observation in 1927. However, 'what we pay' has certainly gone up.

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That was back in the era when we were being rocked by market crashes and depressions and old and poor people were dying in the streets and the meat you bought might still occasionally have a worker's thumb in it, when racism against pretty much everyone was rampant and in certain states you could lynch any black person you wanted if they looked at your womenfolk funny, but won't somebody think about the taxes? So many taxes.
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In another chapter, the Pearson text takes aim at affirmative action with a cartoon showing two aliens in a space ship landing on earth. Pointing toward a man in a suit and tie, one of them exclaims: "This planet is great!-He says we qualify for affirmative action!" The only context is a caption asking readers to parse the cartoon's meaning.

The meaning is that you are growing up in a backwater state where your parents and lawmakers still bitterly resent you having to go to a desegregated school and are expressing that through passive-aggressive insertion of lackluster conservative humor in your social studies textbooks. Feel free to copy that one down, kids, I've just saved you three precious minutes of your lives.
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