TEXAS IS TROUNCING THE LEFT'S WAR ON HISTORY!

Submitted by: Nancy Battle

New Book Documenting Battle Released
By Bill Ames
This article is the introduction to the left’s overall war on America’s traditional values & culture. It’s a tale of how this larger war relates to the left’s War on History in Texas’ public schools.
A major element of the left’s agenda is to indoctrinate our youth while they are still young and impressionable students in our public schools.
Bill Ames’ new book, Texas Trounces the Left’s War on History, describes how, in 2009 and 2010, conservative members of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), along with 100′s of mainstream Texans, battled back to defeat the left’s agenda to take over the social studies curriculum, especially the U. S. History Curriculum in Texas public schools.
The left’s war on American culture
In February 1999, Second Amendment advocate and National Rifle Association President Charlton Heston said in a speech to the Harvard Law School Forum,

“As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that. I’ve come to understand that a culture war is raging across our land.”

In addition to overturning 2nd Amendment rights, the left’s war on American culture has many components:

• Deny the importance of the traditional family.
• Create class warfare to divide Americans.
• Utilize extremist environmental regulations and sustainable development programs to destroy free enterprise and control every aspect of our lives.
• Tear down the Constitution in favor of judicial activism
• Create a “global” mindset to replace American patriotism
• Mock God, religion & morality, and
• Elevate the homosexual lifestyle to natural and normal status.

Finally, the components of the culture war are key elements in the left’s war on education. The left wants full control of school curriculum in order to focus students on each of the above-mentioned components.
The indoctrination of our youth has been characterized as a “transmission belt to socialism” in the recent documentary, AGENDA.
The AGENDA documentary
This excellent documentary is being shown in theaters across the country. Created by former Utah state legislator Curtis Bowers, the documentary AGENDA reveals the roots of the left’s war on our culture.
Quotes from AGENDA, by history’s communist leaders, set the tone for the left’s war on American culture.

“My goal in life is to dethrone God and destroy Capitalism.” - Karl Marx
“America is like a healthy body, and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.” - Joseph Stalin

The documentary solidifies the fact that the left’s agenda in America has firm roots in Marxist/communist ideology.
And on the subject of education……

“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” - Vladamir Lenin

In public education, the focus is no longer on core academic subjects such as reading, writing, math, and science. Rather, the focus in many public school districts is on indoctrination and social engineering: Multiculturalism, social justice, diversity, moral relativism, political correctness, and radical environmentalism.
An all-too-common example occurred not long ago, too close to home for North Texas citizens. The following illustrates the blatant attempt to replace academics with social engineering:

In a 2010 scandal at the Texas Education Agency’s (TEA) Region 10 location in Richardson, Texas, it was revealed that teacher certification candidates are required to study material that instructs the candidates as follows: “Teachers must not define education as basic skills……Rather, as educators, we must help people become committed to social change”.

TEXAS TROUNCES THE LEFT’S WAR ON HISTORY
But sometimes, it is possible for patriotic, conservative Texans to win a key battle in the ongoing culture war.
This book tells the story of how, during 2009 and 2010, the leftist agenda to hijack the public schoolsocial studies standards was defeated in Texas.
Two views of history
There are two competing approaches to teaching U. S. history in our public schools.
The left opts for portraying America as an oppressive, exploitative, racist, imperialistic country, attempting to indoctrinate the student that there is no “social justice”, that opportunities for all do not exist, and that increased dependency on a socialist, and even Marxist government is the only solution.
Earlier this week, columnist Thomas Sowell wrote about the lawless “occupy” youth movement.
These ragtag, misguided occupiers, with their endless, something-for-nothing demands for free entitlements to be paid for by those who work and pay taxes, are a direct result of public schools’ indoctrination for “social change”.
By contrast, mainstream Texans’ view of U.S. history is that America’s good far outweighs her bad, and that our founding principles, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our strong roots in Western Civilization, our work ethic, and our free market economy are the basis for 200-plus years of America’s greatness and leadership in the world.
The majority of Texans believe that these elements should be the foundation for teaching U. S. history in our public schools.
Need an example?
In the left’s view of history, the building of the Erie Canal was described in a Glencoe McGraw-Hill history textbook, up for adoption by the SBOE in 2002, as nothing more than an exploitation of human labor.
Conversely, the traditional version of U.S. history celebrates the construction of the Erie Canal as America’s greatest engineering achievement up to that time.
Texas Trounces the Left’s War on History tells the story about how the inevitable conflict between the two approaches to history was resolved in favor of the traditional, conservative approach to social studies curriculum.
The book relates how, during 2009, a majority of leftist “educators” dominated the fifteen social studies review panels, responsible to review and revise Texas public school social studies standards that had been created in 1998.
The review panels created standards proposals that were unacceptably biased. In future articles, we shall see how the review panels’ majority utilized components of the culture war to develop standards proposals that reflected their negative views of America.
We are not saying here that the review panel members are communists or Marxists. But leaders of the national teachers’ unions, who are overly influential in formulating public education policy in the United States, openly support the components noted in this article, and left-leaning educators follow their union’s lead.
In addition, the ideological makeup of the panels strongly suggests a not-so-subtle attempt to overload the panels with leftist bias.
Balancing the unacceptable standards proposals
Fortunately, mainstream Texans were given the opportunity to work with SBOE conservatives to overcome the left’s attempt to hijack history. The result is a positive standards framework that discourages Texas students from viewing America through the leftists’ prism of contempt.
During the next few weeks, a series of Texas Insider articles will reveal real examples about how the left attacks our culture, and how the final, approved Texas social studies standards, and specifically the U. S. History standards, neutralize the attacks and biases against our traditional values, and will teach our students to be proud Americans.
See www.WNAenterprises.com for additional information about TEXAS TROUNCES THE LEFT’S WAR ON HISTORY.
Bill Ames is an education activist who lives in Dallas. He has worked on Texas curriculum and textbook issues, beginning in 2001. He spent much of 2009 as a member of the review panel for U. S. history. Ames’ book can be ordered at www.WNAenterprises.com.