Indoctrinating the youth

An educated citizenry is the foundation for any great nation, especially a democracy. If we want our democracy to work and our country to prosper again we must continue to educate our children so that they will one day be capable of running the country and contributing to the well-being of the nation. Education is paramount. If you believe that don't move to Texas.

The Texas State Board of Education finds themselves in the unique position of being able to rewrite United States History. Better yet, because Texas buys more textbooks than any other state, the morons on the SBOE have dictated that students all over the country will be indoctrinated rather than taught.

As a teacher, I believe that the purpose of an education is to prepare students to be active and contributing citizens while simultaneously teaching them to think for themselves. It seems that the SBOE in Texas disagrees. They're more concerned with indoctrinating students than with teaching them. The new social studies standards that they've just approved verify that.

Led by Don McLeroy, an idiot posing as a dentist posing as a historian, the Texas SBOE has come up with a list of standards that emphasize America's flawless past while stressing the strict Christian beliefs of our founders. If you were unaware that America has always been in the right or that our founding fathers wanted this great nation to be strictly Christian, then you have already received a better education than most of the people on the Texas SBOE.

The new Texas standards emphasize the role of good citizens and patriots rather than ordinary citizens; they identify the characteristics of good citizenship so that students won't have to figure those out on their own - for the record the SBOE saw fit to delete the phrase "responsibility for the common good" as an obligation of citizenship. Maybe these people go to church with Glenn Beck. The standards require students to learn about the failure of "collectivist, non-market systems" and even makes an attempt at exonerating Joe McCarthy, a disgrace of a Senator who censured by his colleagues and died an alcoholic.

So the Texas SBOE isn't worried about what students learn, they're worried about what students believe. And they want students to believe that America is perfect. That scares me a little bit, because America is not perfect. And if you truly love something then you don't live in denial of its flaws, you work to fix them. Indoctrinating students sets them up for failure and thus sets our country up for failure. America needs leaders who can analyze the problems we face and come up with innovative solutions, not leaders who preach the infallibility of the America.

Let's make America better by combating the changes offered by the Texas SBOE and teaching our children. You shouldn't need indoctrination to love America. I know America's not perfect and I'd rather live here than anywhere else in the world. Telling students that America is flawless and that the American way of life is perfect glosses over the problems our nation faces and if we don't understand the problems then we won't be able to fight them. Teach the children; they'll make America even stronger.