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Tuesday, July 07, 2015

The Civil War's Last Battlefield: The Schools

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in 2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church last month sparked a broad backlash against the Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.

View Full Story from the Washington Post

5 comments:

  1. If slavery was the issue, than why didn't the confederate states return to the Union after the "Corwin" amendment was offered to them? Also, why did Lincoln say in his inaugural speech, he would do nothing about slavery, as this was a non-issue, he was launching a war to restore the Union of states.
    Then there are Lincolns promise to his detractors, to "free the landscape of the Black hosts", by shipping them out of America.
    All of these facts are proof that the war was to restore the Union, and not to free black people.

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  2. The South lost the war and with their tails between their legs, they agreed to rejoin the rest of the country as one nation under one flag, one set of rules under one Constitution.

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  3. slavery was secondary to the issue revolving around the infringement of the federal government on states' rights, much like today; and coincidentally, Texas may be close to secession now.

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  4. The article stated,"A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is tailored to the educational standards of states.”

    There is an attempt by at less some loser states to write history the way they want it written. The winners not the losers are the ones who are to write our history. The Union was the winner and we are all under the US Flag. The desire to dumb down and misled by some states is the reason there needs to be a common core of knowledge taught across our country. This business of state rights has some merit but is crippling to our Nation at the same time.

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  5. "The desire to dumb down and misled by some states is the reason there needs to be a common core of knowledge taught across our country." Bit of an assumption on your part. I would say that any attempts to 'dumb down' or 'mislead' have been perpetrated by the federal govt - not the states.

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