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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Texas Textbook Controversy: Have Your Say

Now that you've read the opinions of our contributors, have your say by leaving a comment.

2 comments:

  1. Art HastingsMarch 17, 2010

    Mr. Lee is being either ignorant or disingenuous when he says the U.S. is "far and away the leader in almost every endeavor we undertake." Maybe the operative term there is "undertake," since we certainly aren't taking care of the basic necessities as well as many other countries. Life expectancy is lower here than in a good dozen other countries, we're one of the few developed nations in the world that does not have universal health care, and well, gosh, just look at our students' test scores in math, the sciences, and any number of other subjects in comparison with those dang Commies in China, for instance.

    As for Ms. Lorenzini, I would only point out that my mother spent the duration of the Second World War behind barbed wire on her native soil (while two of her older brothers served in the U.S. Army in the Pacific Theater) and I regularly meet folks who grew up on the East Coast who tell me they never heard about the Japanese-American internment in school.

    The Texas Board of Education is not trying to "include more things that actually happened in our history" so much as they are trying to soft-peddle and minimize things that actually happened in our history but that make a lot of Texans -- heck, a lot of Americans all over -- uncomfortable. What they're really about is filling education with comforting untruths and misperceptions.

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  2. Art HastingsMarch 18, 2010

    I find it especially ironic that Ms. Lorenzini says Vietnam "was hardly touched upon" in her history courses. This seems perfectly obvious to me, since so many of the lastest generation of youth have marched and flown off to die in another distant land, in a losing war, for goals that are unclear, unstrategic, and probably unattainable. If we had learned the lessons of Vietnam as a country and taught them to our children, we might not have gone so gaily off to Iraq.

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