The Texas Social Studies Standards Are Approved

A Republic, If You Can Keep It!

By Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D.

01 June 2010

The Social Studies Standards battle at the SBOE Corral is over!  But not the war.

The war is far from over.  There are new battles looming ahead in our Texas education system.

After a 19-month long battle that captured national attention and provided daily fodder for the leftist media, the Texas SBOE approved the Texas Social Studies Standards on May 21^st in a 9-5 vote.

This usual leftist arrogant hypocrisy was followed by the usual Washington arrogant hypocrisy as Arne Duncan, U .S. Secretary of Education, criticized the Texas SBOE, "Setting curriculum is a local issue and we should keep politics out of it.”

In a statement after the SBOE’s approval of the Social Studies Standards, Duncan continued, "Parents should be very wary of politicians designing curriculum."

Fortunately for Texas students, it was our SBOE “politicians”, who replaced terms that were deleted from the Social Studies TEKS by the leftist experts/teacher writing teams--Veterans’ Day, July 4^th, Christmas, and Rosh Hashannah.

Duncan’s criticism was nothing more than a magician’s act of diverting public attention from the federal takeover of education with the “Race to the Top” initiative and a national curriculum.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Bill White immediately jumped into the fray with a promise that he will pick a new SBOE chairman, if he is elected in November, to “undo some of the damage” from the controversial social studies curriculum standards.  Translated: rewrite the standards to suit the politically correct, multicultural, cultural Marxist agenda to destroy our traditional values and Christian heritage.

Unwittingly actress Whoopi Goldberg, while hosting ABC’s The View recently, voiced the conservative viewpoint on reporting accurate history as she questioned the curriculum changes of the liberal review panel’s standards, "Just because you don't like how stuff went, you're not allowed to rewrite it.”

Conservatives couldn’t agree more.

After the Constitutional Convention had finished its work in 1787, a woman asked Ben Franklin what kind of government had been decided upon. He replied: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Today we are in grave danger of not being able to keep our republic.

With the dumbing down of our education curricula and leftist indoctrination of our students, many Americans do not know what their rights are and the limits placed on our federal government by our Constitution.

Many think we live in a democracy, not understanding how that would jeopardize our liberty.  In the new standards students will study why the Founding Fathers decided upon a constitutional republic as our form of government.

The Board also approved a standard to encourage students to study the Constitution and the First Amendment to learn about religious freedom.    The amendment reads, “Examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America and guaranteed it free exercise by saying that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof and compare and contrast this to the phrase “separation of church and state.”” (a phrase that does not appear in any founding documents.)

Now our Texas students will have the opportunity to study a positive and accurate accounting of our nation’s history; read original sources; and learn about American Exceptionalism, our Judeo-Christian heritage, our unalienable rights given us by our Creator; and the benefits of our free enterprise system.

The stakes are high in this ideological war because the radical leftists must control the education process and textbooks with their propaganda if they are to be successful in destroying our country from within.

Our founders warned us about the need to educate our citizenry. To quote Benjamin Franklin, “This will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins.”

As our students gain knowledge and understanding of our Constitution, they will recognize the motives and lies of greedy, self-serving politicians who prattle on about such nonsense as health care being a right the federal government is giving them.  They will be prepared to be good watch dogs over our Constitution.

The war is far from over.  There are new battles looming ahead in our Texas education system.  Even now Texas Freedom Network is garnering its troops to “support comprehensive sex-ed” in the revision of the health curriculum standards.

The liberals will stop at nothing in their efforts to destroy our traditional values and our country. We must be equally dedicated to fighting and winning the war to ‘keep our republic.’

Copyright ©2010 Carole Hornsby Haynes, Ph.D., All rights reserved

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