Texas Textbook War – Erase the Era of the Founding of America?

TEA (Texas Education Association) is considering substituting new textbooks for old that instead of teaching American history, will teach “GLOBAL” history with the purpose of developing “GLOBAL CITIZENS. When you consider that Texas and California are trend-setters in textbook production for the entire United States, it is easy to see how this change could have a major impact nationwide. At the moment, we need only concern ourselves with Texas because California, having been broke for quite some time has not purchased textbooks for years and may not in the foreseeable future.

Okay, now for the real shocker. TEA would also introduce new textbooks on the history of the United States that exclude all the founding years up until 1877, that’s right, the part that teaches about our ancestor heroes and how they made us a great nation. That means our children will no longer learn how the Constitution was derived or any of the history of the Civil War.

As a writer and historian and better yet, as an American, I am appalled by such an idea and cannot imagine our school systems omitting this formative part of our culture and heritage. Don’t they think it is an important base of our children’s education, children who in all likelihood will find themselves one day serving this nation in some remote country like Afghanistan with a rifle in their hands and people shooting at them? Wouldn’t it help their resolve to know they are keeping up with a tradition of defending their rights and the rights of others that goes back to the American Revolution?

How did we get here and how will it impact the future? One important loss will be the failure to teach our next generations about the mistakes that were made that no wants repeated. For example, not all our history includes examples that they can can look back on with pride. Let us not forget that the reason we fought the Civil War was to abolish slavery. Don’t we want our children to learn that freedom does not come easily? Not just freedom for all races and all colors but freedom of speech and the right to own property. Are we no longer proud of the accomplishments of our founding fathers and mothers? Shouldn’t they know how Betsy Ross made the first flag or that a strong and courageous woman named Florence Nightingale made important contributions to the hospital environment? Do we no longer want to hold up these great Americans as examples and role models for our future generations?

It is as if your parents planned to raise you leaving out your ancestry and tales of how they got their start and ultimately how you got yours. Doesn’t everyone want to know who their parents were? The new textbooks used throughout the land in the future may no longer teach our children how America got its start. This is even more astounding when you take into account that the best grossing movie of all time was “Gone With The Wind,” a book written about the period in our nation’s history that TEA wants to erase.

Copyright 2010 Gregory David Page