12:55 – The board just voted for an amendment by Cynthia Dunbar that students learn that “the laws of nature and nature’s God” be included in a list of political ideas in history that influenced the writing of the Constitution and other founding documents.
1:02 – Now Dunbar moves to replace “democratic republic” to “constitutional republic” in referring to U.S. government throughout all of the social studies standards.
1:30 – The board has recessed for lunch until 2:30.
That would be fine if they stick to a historically accurate review of religion as it related, positively and negatively, to the historical events of the country.
In her LooneyTunes University Law School classes, she teaches that the Constitution should be interpreted as including the Declaration of Independence.
They should hire Larry F. to help them teach law there.
Hi all. I have been out of town on a research trip and just returned, so I have missed all of the SBOE festivities up to now.
Cynthia wants to remove the word “democratic” because she wants nothing in the social studies curriculum that even narrowly admits of existence of a Democratic Party since time time of Andrew Jackson. In other words, she is attempting to craft an exclusively Republican Party-oriented history curriculum. That crap needs to be stopped pronto. This is a country of Republicans, Democrats, and various shades of other parties and our lovable group of Independent voters. This is nothing less than a crass attempt to play party politics with children’s education and use it to wall out traditional thoughts and opinions about American c=government that she just happens to personall not like. Anyone have a hand grenade (figuratively speaking)?
Has Cynthia Dunbar defined “God” yet?
NO textbook company is going to go for this…If they do they should be run out of business.
The good thing about all of this TEA will not test on this material in the TAK tests (or at least they shouldn’t)
So teachers will not have to focus on this at all…They could easily skip over it…Lets just hope the teachers in todays classrooms are smarter than the people on the board.
They’re going to lose this war, and as they do, they will become more shrill, hysterical, agitated, and they will craft more and more dog-whistle appeals to the die-hard crazies to do their bidding.
That’s just my prediction.
I think it will stand up.
The Declaration was written by Thomas Jefferson. He specifically designated “Nature’s God” and not the biblical God. He was so opposed to the supernatural that he cut all the passages that related to anything supernatural out of his Bible.
That may be their point Mike. For the longest time, people threw Thomas Jefferson at them with no effect. Finally, I suspect they heard about the Danbury Baptists for the 1,000,000th time, and it finally registered that Thomas Jefferson was NOT a Christian fundamentalist and NOT a lot of other “positive” things that they had imagined. Therefore, now that Jefferson’s being the father of “separation of church and state” has finally sunk into their gray matter, he has made their poop list. After all, if there never was any such thing as separation of church and state, how could there be a person who dreamed it up? Exit Thomas Jefferson. This is gettin’ scary folks.
I wonder how long the coalition of anti-enlightenment conservative religious groups would hold together if they actually achieved their objectives of medievalment? How will the fundies and the catholics get along?
They haven’t thunked it out that far ahead, yet. They’ll have to figure out a way to keep the kids from learning about 500 years or so of European history. All that sectarian strife.
The intent may be to erase any mention of the “democrat” party but the final effect is to reject democracy. With the push to do away with the 17th (?) amendment (replace election of senators with selection by state legislatures) aren’t these folks really against democracy?