The Texas State Board of Education excludes Thomas Jefferson from a list of influential historical figures

AAAAAHHHHH!!!! Why is Texas full of idiots!?

looks like i'll be paying for public "education" with my taxes and home-school with my pocketbook

Personally I don't think evolution or creation should be taught in schools--it's irrelevant. How did any human being currently living get here? Their parents had sex or a doctor combined a human male sperm with a human female egg in a test tube or a petri dish. So essentially nobody can honestly or logically say whether evolution or creation explains how the universe was formed or if people were created by God or evolved from some other closely linked species thus the only purpose of the discussion is to start people fighting over faith. (and whether that faith is in God or in science is again irrelevant and just perpetuates the cycle) So to me we should stop wasting valuable time arguing philosophy when students could be taught something useful like a trade or a skill so they could get a job or start a new business based here in the United States that employs others from this country and allows us to build ourselves back up and become a world leader that then draws people from other countries to us--rather than what we have now where the rest of the world laughs at our silly theological and semantic debates all the way to the bank.

Seriously why get bogged down in teaching evolution or creation when we could and should be teaching our next generation how to write their government representative a letter or how to figure out if the bank was ripping them off with a sub-prime mortgage or how to put their car in neutral in order to cause the engine to stall so they don't get killed when the brakes fail or how to file a class action lawsuit when their trick of putting their car in neutral fails or whatever else is actually relevant to their current day to day life and their future as human beings.

That's Funny when Is FOX news going to go after the Texas school
board for indoctrinating are kids oh thats right the school board
is consevative so it dosen't count LOL.

This is why I have always gotten involved with my childrens education..I spend time enlightening my kids with information that is not made available in the classroom...My kids are all familiar with the work of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins etc...without that they are being fed an enormous amount of useless propaganda that has no value in dealing with the world as it actually exists.

Instead of manipulating historical facts through omission students need to be taught better critical thinking skills. The underlying problem is that most Americans see the founding fathers and the constitution as infallible sources of knowledge. While proof has yet to be presented that the founding fathers were benevolent man-gods, people have no problem quoting them as if they were in-fact all-knowing deities who were able to see the future and prescribe the best courses of action for our modern predicaments. I agree with Jefferson's views on the separation of church and state, but I disagree with a number of his other ideas. See, I applied critical thinking to this man's views and formed my own conclusions. So my solution, is to teach history as balanced as possible, but teach better critical thinking skills, then people would be able to decide for themselves if they think separation from church and state is BS.

Also, if anybody is foolish enough to think that Texas along with the federal government has not been influencing what you have been learning since grade-school, I am sorry to tell you that most elementary and high school text books are, and have been, biased as hell for a long time. This is nothing new, but I am glad this story is bringing this type of information control to the front of peoples minds.

Lastly, I think the publishing companies should take a stand. One option is these companies could just not cater to Texas and if they lose Texas' business they got 49 other states. Second, the publishing companies could edit their books specially for Texas and charge the state more per book and continue to sell not-as-biased books to the rest of the country.

Of course the best solution would be for the US to adopt a national curriculum and not let individual states decide what core curriculum is taught in their schools. I am hoping this is something the Obama administration shoots for.

I can't think of any other way to say this, this is a fucking embarrassment to the rest of the nation. And although there are sure to be some people who disagree that this is an embarrassment and think that this is actually a really good thing, what they don't understand is that it is crap like this that has and will further continue to take the United States from being a superpower nation and turn it into a barely modern nation slightly above being a third world country.

I bet the founding fathers intended to let Mexico keep Texas.

I won't consider any American History class to be acceptable in this country until "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn is the approved text...

Way to go Texas, its good to know you dont care about education. And i live in Texas.

Everything's big in Texas. We got BIG BIGOTS!

Imagine... a world without Texas

I am getting so sick and tired of hearing about this fucking Texas Board of Education. Who the fuck made them gods?

I am going to pray every day that God takes these fuckers out and smites them with his mighty hand.

One of the things I found interesting about the changes was their intent to change the idea of capitalism because apparently it has a "negative connotation" to it; now replacing the word with "free-enterprise system" in all textbooks.

I wonder why it has a negative connotation to it? Maybe because we've capitalized and commercialized education and health care. We made it okay to buy/sell our health and education (specifically higher education). And we all know what happens in this country when someone realizes that they can make a quick buck! The product/service decreases in quality in order to increase in quantity and make more money for those capitalizing on the product/service.

I really don't have a problem with capitalism. I only have a problem with it when it involves the health and education of the people in my society.

Stop making it harder to be healthy and smart. It's annoying.

That is like trying to say that Bowie And Austin were not really part of Texas history. Those worthy gentalmen would not have stood for the present state of tyranical idealisme against free will.

this is ridiculous.

when do we get to exclude Texas from the list of states? damn that Alamo, can't we give them back to Mexico?

There are two things at work here. Texas school board stupidity and corporate Americas willingness to sell that stupidity to other states.

Lets face it, these people are a few watts short of lit. I saw a snippet of an interview with one of the school board fools and his comment was that American "exceptionalism" has returned. I guess he doesn't know that the whole concept of American exceptionalism was introduced by...you guessed it, Thomas Jefferson!

Second and possibly more importantly, there is an American publisher who is willing to print and sell bullshit in order to maintain the bottom line. This directly ties into my belief that there is no such thing as an American Corporation. Corporations extend no loyalties to any country or system of government. There loyalty is to money, period. If that means printing lies and ideological nonsense in order to make a buck, so be it. This is what makes the SCOTUS decision lifting the cap on corporate federal campaign contribution so vile.

Guess they feel Jefferson did not contribute to the establishment of the country. Also these board members must have slept through history class.

Will Jefferson be replaced with Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck?