I know like many of you I am dismayed that a few uber conservatives on the state school board were able to ram thru some dramatic changes to the states education system, and if this was still 1950 it would be extremely damaging since the internet and google did not exist back then.
Our education came solely from the teachers and what was in the text books we were allowed to be taught from. Today anyone can type Martin Luther King into a web search engine and read from tens of thousands of sources on his life, his civil rights movenment, his time spent in jail and read every word and even hear his speeches online, that was not possible in the 60s, the 70s the 80s and even into the 90s but then along came the internet, and the truth is there, by simply searching for it. Yes, you will also find a lot of garbage on the net, but all of the truth is also available. People that truly want to learn will do so, like the brilliant minds that came before the age of the internet the thinkers still found a way to learn what "the authorities" did not want them to learn. They traveled and went to different places and saw for themselves what was going on , and found libraries that contained written works, by the people who thought outside of the "normal box".
People like Einstein, Edison, Marconni, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Thurgood Marshall, they learned by living not what was taught solely in text books from a school board.
So while this seems like a step back to the stone age, it really isn't all that. Like the work of the TEA party in Utah who manipulated Senator Bennett out of the Republican party nomination a small group of people in Texas has changed and will allow a "conservative history" to be taught to children in public schools in Texas, these children still have parents who will tell them there are different thoughts on aspects of history.
Histories are always written by the "victors" I am sure the Germans have a different history of WW1 and WW2 than what we present in our histories of those wars, they saw it from a different lens. I imagine many Germans followed their government much like the American people followed Bush and Cheney into the war in Iraq, which as we as a nation now pretty much agree, we were lied to, to enable the administration to take us into the mess in Iraq. It was much easier after the attack of 9/11 people were scared of having another 9/11, so we mostly were silent as the lies were told about weapons of mass destruction, the attempts to tie Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda despite the fact that Sunni and Shias are not allies.
That is one of the reasons Saddam spent most of his time as leader of Iraq waging war against Iran, with a brief time out for his invasion of Kuwait, which drew the United States into the Persian Gulf mess, mostly due to the requests of Saudi Arabia where much of the worlds oil comes from and which almost all nations need for gasoline.
I am sure the history books will eventually be written to ignore the LIES told to the American people and the world to entice us into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, nothing will be mentioned that we violated international law by invading a nation without just cause, we did it to stop Saddam from possibly doing something with WMDs in the future.
That is like taking a 17 year old juvenile delinquent and executing him because we feel that when he grew up he was going to kill someone, so we wanted to prevent that from happening. Bottom line it is illegal, and the invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law. The problem is there is no one that can or will hold the people who did it accountable, we are not members of the ICC, we do not recognize their arrest warrants, we insulate elected officials for things they did while in public office.
But back to why I am not that concerned by the Texas school board actions, the internet and colleges will still educate people that want to learn the truth, we all know one book is not the definite answer to anything. It can aptly be compared to watching just Fox news to learn your news, you know it is going to be slanted or just flat lied about tobenefit the conservative movement or candidates, if you watch MSNBC you get what the left leaning hosts want you to learn, CNN I am not sure what they are doing any longer but news is far from being an accurate description, some days I think they are just plain ignorant or they want to be like Fox, they seem to be a ship adrift.
When Ted Turner owned and operated it, it was the leader in NEWS, now it seems to be a ship lost at sea. But the fact is we all know it, we also know that we need to read newspaper articles, news magazines and sometimes even watch both Fox and MSNBC to find out all sides so we can maybe find the actual truth hidden in the middle of their slanted views.
With the internet and google and other search engines test books no longer have the impact on students lives that they did in the 20th century, in the olden days text books was the only information available aside from the public library, now wuth computer access we all have more information available to us than any library in any town in America, you can access the Library of Congress, hundreds of thousands of free books, newspapers, magazines, films, audio tapes often from the people we want to learn about.
Like the TEA party the Texas school board has made a loud noise but it's long term effects will be minimal at best.
Long live the internet and net freedom