Texas has long been rather dependent on the U.S. government, despite numerous threats to secede, led by Presidential hopeful, Rick Perry. The state ranks 11th in the amount they rely on the federal government, while it is #1 in teenage pregnancy. It is also the epicenter of textbook publishing, where a movement to rewrite history won a victory in 2010.
They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”
Fox News and their guest, Associate History Professor at Dallas University (a Catholic School) Dr. Susan Hanssen are discussing the liberally elitist AP-US History test (APUSH). Kilmeade and Hanssen just can't stand the amount of negative history the test contains. Why not rewrite history? Republicans do it all the time. Didn't Obama create the mess in Iraq? See, it's so easy to do.
The 'professor' explains that the best thing to happen to education in the last 50 years are charter schools, home school curriculum, parent led co-ops, and a lot of Christian-led academies.
People have been realizing this really from the 1970's that the APUSH exams and courses are a private company that has a government monopoly. But in the past 2 years, the new guidelines have made it abundantly clear there's bias in the teaching of APUSH courses.
Kilmeade interrupts,
"and they're de-emphasizing the things like the success of the Constitution for a different interpretation."
Is that a fact, Brian? De-emphasizing the success of the Constitution.? I'd love to see one example of that idiotic premise. Dr. Hanssen continued,
Just look at the index of the 70 page guide, there are 3 references to the Constitution, and the references talk about the postponement of dealing with the slavery issue, the fact that the Constitution didn't deal with the tribal lands of Native Americans and the fact that it left so many loose ends, divisive political parties arose. There's no discussion of limited government, checks and balances, the idea of natural right, the ideas of nature and nature as GOD.
AHA! There it is. GOD....the Texas academics want more GOD.
How dare we force our children to take a secular test. How could we rehash that unpleasantness known as slavery and how it's been more than 100 years and things are far from equal? Shouldn't we just forget what we did to the Native Americans who owned this country before we usurped it through Manifest Destiny. Without the interjection of God, maybe we wouldn't have justified the heinous acts.
Kilmeade claims the 55 historians who drafted this letter have no agenda. It sure doesn't sound like that, especially since most are from religious schools. like Dallas University, Baylor, Notre Dame and Pepperdine.
The 2014 framework makes a dramatic shift away from that emphasis, choosing instead to grant far more extensive attention to “how various identities, cultures, and values have been preserved or changed in different contexts of U.S. history with special attention given to the formation of gender, class, racial and ethnic identities.” The new framework makes a shift from “identity” to “identities.” Indeed, the new framework is so populated with examples of American history as the conflict between social groups, and so inattentive to the sources of national unity and cohesion, that it is hard to see how students will gain any coherent idea of what those sources might be. This does them and us, an immense disservice.
It's simple to see that they don't like all these other ethnic groups taking over White, Christian History. Hanssen warns of a "pervasive anti-patriotism...what we're teaching is cynicism." Kilmeade is utterly perplexed at
where that school of thought comes from, aren't we pulling for the home team?
Clearly the Conservative mindset is so replete with feelings of religious superiority and jingoistic nationalism that these people want to block unpleasant history permanently from the curriculum of the next generation. American Exceptionalism has been a dangerous mindset that has caused our status as a respected nation to drop precipitously, yet they want that to be the primary focus of AP U.S. History. How about, let's allow history to determine the course, not the right-wing interpretation of the subject?
