Conservative Christians Trying Their Damnedest to Make America's Kids Wildly Ignorant

AlterNet [1] / By Amanda Marcotte

Conservative Christians Trying Their Damnedest to Make America's Kids Wildly Ignorant

September 17, 2014 |

One of the biggest obstacles for the conservative movement when it comes to recruiting new members is, to be frank, reality itself. History, science, economics are all fields constantly churning out information that makes right-wing ideology look silly, nonsensical and even delusional. In response, the conservative movement has launched a massive media campaign against reality that spreads out on Fox News, talk radio and the web, but despite all this, conservatives are not satisfied. The kids are who conservatives really want. That’s why the right is relentless about its attempts to get into public schools, throw out actual information and replace it with false and misleading ideology. Whether or not they’ll actually be successful in tricking kids into becoming conservatives is up for debate, but in the meantime, they are doing a lot of damage to childrens' ability to get a decent education.

The latest battle in the ongoing war to turn public schools into propaganda machines for the right is being fought in the state of Texas. The state is often at the center of conservative-fomented education controversies, as right-wingers there keep trying to sneak creationism into the science classroom [3]. Texas also continues to maintain its abysmally high teen pregnancy rate by pushing sex “education” that usually doesn’t bother [4] to mention contraception. While the right has been losing some ground on those two issues, a new report from the Texas Freedom Network [5] suggests that conservatives have been able to inject a shocking number of lies and disinformation into public school history classrooms.

And while it may be tempting to think kids getting a subpar education is a red state-only problem, in reality what happens to Texas affects the rest of the country, including blue states. Because of Texas' size, what they want in textbooks [6]often becomes the only thing publishers are willing to offer. Your kid may be going to school in some other state, but what she reads in class may be decided by what some right-wingers in Texas want to indoctrinate kids into believing.

As the Washington Post reports [7], a group of 10 scholars in politics and history examined the proposed textbooks and found that they were stuffed full of lies and distortions, intended to trick students into believing right-wing myths about government, racism and whether or not America is supposed to be a “Christian nation.”

Emile Lester, a political science associate professor at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia, was one of the reviewers. The State Board of Education and “these textbooks have collaborated to make students’ knowledge of American history a casualty of the culture wars,” he writes in his report.

More:
http://www.alternet.org/education/conservative-christians-trying-their-damnedest-make-americas-kids-wildly-ignorant