We continue our review of the outrageous and offensive things we heard from the right in 2016. Public education continues to be a battleground in the right’s culture wars. So today let’s look at some of what the right had to say about education this year. You can check out previous posts from the Year in Quotes here.
“And so when we have 88 to 90 percent, which is approximately the number of the students that are being educated within our socialized education system, effectively indoctrinating our children with our own tax dollars, guess what? We lose every other issue. We lose life, we lose marriage, we lose all of it. So I think this is the linchpin issue.”
– Former Texas State Board of Education member Cynthia Dunbar, urging far-right state lawmakers at a “ProFamily Legislator’s Conference” to get involved in education in order to stop the “deception of the seed” by “our socialized education system”
“[American industrialists doing business in Mexico] were used to their workers putting in a full day’s work, quietly and obediently, and respecting rules, authority, and property. In contrast, Mexican laborers were not reared to put in a full day’s work so vigorously. There was a cultural attitude of ‘mañana,’ or ‘tomorrow,’ when it came to high-gear production. It was also traditional to skip work on Mondays, and drinking on the job could be a problem. The result was that Mexican laborers were seen as inferior and kept in low-paying, unskilled jobs that did not provide a pathway upward.”
– A stunning passage from Mexican American Heritage, an offensive, error-riddled textbook from Cynthia Dunbar’s publishing company Momentum Instruction. Dunbar submitted the textbook for adoption by the Texas State Board of Education.
“It’s really kind of amusing. The left-leaning, radical Hispanic activists, having pounded the table for special treatment, get approval for a special course that nobody else wanted. Now they don’t like their special textbook? I bet they want everyone to also get an A for just attending? The one thing we can’t fix in this world is unhappy people.”
– Texas State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, complaining about criticism that a Mexican-American studies textbook proposed for Texas public schools was filled with errors and racial stereotypes. The state board ultimately voted unanimously to reject adoption of the textbook.
“Every system of Satanic thought has a flaw somewhere, and if you identify that flaw and tug at it, the whole tapestry collapses.”
– Neal Frey, who heads the notorious, Texas-based textbook censorship organization Educational Research Analysts, defending his efforts to purge public school textbooks of “liberal bias,” evolution, homosexuality, and other sins (as he sees them)
