July 14th, 2009:

via The Culture Wars’ New Front: U.S. History Classes in Texas – WSJ.com.

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

Republicans are paranoid. The Board of Education has cherry-picked three conservative “experts” to loudly protest what they perceive to be liberal bias in the social studies curriculum. They have a mission to save the children from the dangerous ideology of those godless liberals from creeping into the little minds of the fifth graders.

Never mind what is true and what is not, the Republicans demand that the children, k-12, get their daily dose of a christian god even though they may not want it, or even though their parents may not want conservative ideology poisoning their kids’ brains. They want to press upon the social studies classes that the founding fathers built this nation on christian fundamentals, even though they absolutely did not.

Rev. Peter Marshall

(snip) “We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it,” said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

(snip) The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America’s founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man’s fall and inherent sinfulness, or “radical depravity,” which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

(snip) “America is a special place and we need to be sure we communicate that to our children,” said Don McLeroy, a leading conservative on the board. “The foundational principles of our country are very biblical…. That needs to come out in the textbooks.”

Radical Depravity is a new and more accepted version of the concept of “total depravity“, which is one of the Five Points of Calvinism. Radical Depravity narrows the concept away from “total”, but it doesn’t matter which one is used. They are the pretty much th same thing.

These “expert” advisers are telling the Texas School Board that the veto power that the President has over Congress was written into the Constitution because Calvinists believe that man, even when he is at his best, is inherently bent toward sin and that god almighty alone can only supply the veto, so to speak. Conversely, the fact that Congress can then override the President’s veto is because Calvinists believe that man, even at his best, is in total sin and incapable of choice proving that without their god, there could be no checks and balances. They want to apply this belief to the Texas civics books saying that the authors of  the Constitution found that these solutions to years of oppression under the English king were a heavenly intervention and not the ideas of  the trained and skilled statesmen.

Not only are these conservative “experts” willing to take the argument this far, they are saying that the founding fathers did this purposefully, deliberately, realizing fully that they were implementing one of the Five Points of Calvinism as they designed our system of checks and balances.

This fantasy about our founding fathers is what they want the Texas children to be taught – and it is simply not true. Their intention was for the Constitution to be secular.

Another, and no  less important, underlying motive to their insistence that the textbooks are slanted left is, of course, political. They are running scared from the results of the 2008 election. Exit polls in Texas show that a large majority of 18-29 year olds voted for Barack Obama. In the reddest of red states, 54% of them voted for Obama, and the Democratic Party registered more new Democrats than did the Republicans.  They also realize that when a person decides to affiliate with a political party at an early age, they tend to stick with that party throughout their lives meaning that when this demographic turns 50 years old, the hard and fast grip that Conservatives have on the electorate will slip away. The ultra right-wing conservatives are trying to introduce more conservative ideology, and more fundamental christianity, to younger students in order to nip liberalism in the bud.

They want to raise fundamentalist Republicans instead of enlightned and educated adults.