Radical Texas Board of Education Replaces Mention of Hip Hop in Social Studies Books with More Thomas Jefferson

This comes from the pick-your-battles-wisely file. Educators (read: progressive bureaucrats who voted for Obama) are all aghast over the changes being made to social studies textbooks by the Texas Board of Education. And what exactly did the radical Texas Board of Education do? They worked overtime to return some sanity to our history books like omitting discussions on hip hop's contribution to society in favor of more coverage of the founding fathers. Shocking, I know. After thirty or more years of the Left using history books to bash capitalism and limited government while celebrating New Deal policies and sympathizing with socialists, crucial beliefs for the Democrats electoral success, conservatives are finally standing up and removing the politically correct gobbledygook that should have never been there in the first place.

For the most part, all the changes are minor and for the better. My personal favorite? Dispelling the myth that "separation of church and state" is in the Constitution. It's not. It comes from Thomas Jefferson's "Wall of Separation" letter, an argument I've had to have hundreds of times with poor Lefty saps who were clearly (mis-)educated in our public schools.

Texas schoolchildren will be required to learn that the words "separation of church and state" aren't in the Constitution and evaluate whether the United Nations undermines U.S. sovereignty under new social studies curriculum.

In final votes late Friday, conservatives on the State Board of Education strengthened requirements on teaching the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers and required that the U.S. government be referred to as a "constitutional republic" rather than "democratic."

The board approved the new standards with two 9-5 votes along party lines after months of ideological haggling and debate that drew attention beyond Texas. The guidelines will be used to teach some 4.8 million students for the next 10 years. They also will be used by textbook publishers who often develop materials for other states based on those approved in Texas, though Texas teachers have latitude in deciding how to teach the material.

The moonbats on the Left will make this out to be a backwoods decision by religious zealots and whine about "politicizing education", but that's only because they've been getting away with doing the same for so long, turning our universities into a bastion of liberalism and our elementary schools into halls of indoctrination for the new faith of environmentalism. Conservatives would do well to fight back more often.

President Orders More Indoctrination, Please!

You would think in a week where several videos surfaced of public school teachers indoctrinating students with probamaganda, now would be the worst time for the president to propose longer school years and more hours per day spent in public classrooms. After all, you don't want to give those "crazies" who compare you to dictators more fodder. But that's exactly what the president did over the weekend. One can only assume he must have liked what he saw in videos like this:

And this one, all over cable news:

The teachers, of course, claim the kids wrote these songs - and only during the last five minutes of class after their academic work was completed. Really? Seems like a pretty big production to me. Can I give them a pop quiz on their multiplication tables? I don't know many nine year olds who use phrases like "diversity" and "the ground shifted." The second video by itself is a tylenol commercial waiting to happen.

President Bush had No Child Left Behind. This president has No Leftist Child Gets Behind a Conservative. To be fair, the videos were the ideas of the teachers and school districts, not the president. But Obama hasn't spoken out against them or expressed concern that students spend more time learning math and civics and less time learning about him. Shocking, isn't it, given the president mentions himself more times in his speeches than the country he represents?

In fact, if you go back to his campaign last fall, Obama has made a concerted effort to recruit those far too young to cast a ballot. The official Barack Obama website encouraged kids 12 and under to organize and campaign for him by throwing "My Barack" parties, staging mock elections, sending cards designed by Obama's staff to their grandparents pleading for their vote, and even coloring his "O" logo to display on their school bags.

If you don't think it can happen in America, think again. It's happening. I would blow it off if it were just one incident taken out of context, but this is becoming a pattern.

In another case of probamaganda, this worksheet was handed out as a school assignment after the president spoke about health care. Here the teacher presented Obama's claims as unquestionable facts, even though they've been disputed by the Associated Press and the nonpartisan CBO. Proof that it's not the president's speeches being shown in classrooms that cause the controversy, it's how teachers use them to push their own biased agendas.

I know when I was a student, especially in grades 6 through 12, you could usually tell if a teacher was liberal or conservative, but they never went so far as to tell you which candidate they supported. We used to ask our teachers sometimes, and they would always say it was a private matter. In America, they would tell us, we have a secret ballot. Politics was considered off-limits in the classroom until we got older, when the room was split in half and both sides of a controversial issue were discussed with the teacher playing neutral moderator.

That's obviously not the case today. Public schools shouldn't tell our children what political party is better any more than they have a right to tell them what religion is the truest. But when just disagreeing with the president's policies can get you labeled as a racist, is anyone surprised they try?

If you want to make kids smarter, stop teaching progressive fluff like the content in these videos. None of this is going to prepare them for life or teach them skills necessary for a career. President Obama misses the point on how to fix our education system. More hours in failing schools with ineffective teachers will add nothing to a student's ability to learn. It will add nothing to our international rank in math and science. Real education reform, just like health care, should be about quality, not quantity. That includes vouchers, but the president is opposed to them, too.

Sadly, as we are beginning to see, President Obama believes that more government is always the answer. And if you don't agree, just give it time. Maybe you can be indoctrinated.

Hat Tip: Michelle Malkin