Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Diane Rehm: How Texas Textbooks Teach The Civil War And The History Of Racial Segregation

Let’s make the South stop lying: The right’s war on our history — and truth

Salon Magazine

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/14/lets_make_the_south_stop_lying_the_rights_war_on_our_history_and_truth_must_be_defeated_now/

Excerpt: "For years, the right has waged a war on history every bit as relentless as and even more effective than its war on science. George Orwell famously observed that “who controls the past controls the future.” In America few outside the political right took his point. It has carried the fight to colleges, media, government and especially public schools. An ineluctable lesson of Charleston is that the left must finally fight back. As far back as the early`80s the religious right sought to elect its people to school boards, often instructing them to conceal their views until after they were elected. Sex education was their top priority, but they also dove into history and other social studies. In her book “As Texas Goes: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins tells the story of the Texas School Board. Only she could make this chilling tale amusing."

Diane Rehm Show

Texas Textbooks And Teaching The Civil War And America’s History Of Racial Segregation

Audio File: http://dianerehmshow.com/shows/2015-07-08/texas-textbooks-and-teaching-the-civil-war-and-americas-history-of-racial-segregation

Listen

Texas textbooks are in the news again. Five years ago, state education officials created a stir when they changed curriculum guidelines to address what some on the board of education saw as a liberal bias. Those changes were incorporated into new textbooks. Now the textbooks are ready for delivery to about 5 million Texas students when school begins in the fall. Critics say the revisions whitewash America’s history of racial segregation and distort the causes of the Civil War. Texas officials dispute the charges. We look at the controversy over teaching American history in Texas and elsewhere.

Guests

Isabel Wilkerson Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration."
Emma Brown education reporter, The Washington Post.
Robert Hicks community preservationist and author of "The Widow of the South" and "A Separate Country."
Donald McLeroy former chairman of the Texas Board of Education.
James W. Loewen sociologist and author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong."