A number of commenters have noted that the US is technically a republic. The problem I have with the Texas Board of Education teaching that we are a republic and not a democracy is that this is primarily an effort at rebranding and not really about technical accuracy.

If every student in Texas could write a technical analysis explaining the differences between a republic and a democracy I would be pleased as punch!

The reason they want the US to be called a republic is specifically because they want to promote the idea that in the US we have “republican values.” David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders and transparently spells out the motive at work here:

“…we have ‘republican’ values or ‘republican’ process rather than ‘democratic’ values or process.” (See his review of the standards here PDF).

What is clear is that this is not motivated by a thorough understanding of civics, rather this is a rebranding effort plain and simple.

They also attempt to rebrand capitalism, which they take to have too many negative associations (I wonder why that would be?), as the “free-enterprise system.”

Texas doesn’t want you to know this! Those hippy liberals don’t want you to know this!

Personally, I think the things they’ve added are important. I just don’t generally trust strong partisans of either side to properly represent why, and that includes me.

I hope that doesn’t happen. I regard the culture wars as a trap. On the one hand you can’t just ignore this right-wing hijacking of our history. If we ignore it these distortions will remain unchallenged. But as we respond we have to be careful not fall into a kind of mimetic rivalry where we end up with a mirror image of what we are resisting and produce a leftist distortion of history.

I think the way we avoid this trap is to develop a kind of healthy indifference to these right-wing distortions. We must keep our eyes on the prize. If we focus on responsible scholarship there will be more than enough material for conservatives and progressives to work with.

I hope that this project develops elements of great literature. A well written history should provide a kind of Rorschach blot to each student that they have to interpret on their own. There is enough material in our history to work with and end up with solid conservative positions.

A smart young kid who studies history will encounter all kinds of things that frustrate the image she would like to have of her world (and herself). The Texas textbook removes this frustration, it gives the conservative conclusion without the hard work of earning that conclusion.

The problem with many contemporary conservatives is that instead of wresting with these frustrating facts they wave a magic wand (borrowed from Christine O’Donnell no doubt) and get rid of them all together inventing facts from whole cloth to take their place. The problem with the Texas textbook is that they take out the reality principle which resists our own ideals and wishes. Or as Stephen Colbert aptly put it, “reality has a well known liberal bias.”

One of my past history teachers put it sort of like this — the history books are never accurate, no matter how hard they might try to be. It’s our job to discern the truth to the best of our ability and from all information that we can gather, and even then we may not have it right.

Fantasy or not, it’s important information that helps us to understand the people who are presenting it to us a little better. I think it’s more important to be informed about than oblivious to seemingly archaic or uninformed modes of thinking.

Intelligent Design may not be accurate or correct, but then again, how much of any of our past or present knowledge is (like man’s prior – hopefully not again – belief that the world is flat)?

There are completely different degrees of accuracy and correctness. Asimov’s Relativity of Wrong is a good essay on the subject. Including all sides on issues sounds like a good thing to do, but in practice, a general overview always means restricting your attention to the most important ones.

Examples?

Where I live, Queensland, Australia, they stopped teaching history in schools years ago. Perhaps because Queensland happens to have a rather murky history, with importing of slaves from the Pacific until the 1920s; genocide; racism; plus corruption of the electoral system, suppression of free speech and of the right of assembly around the 1970s – to name a few things.

At least with the Texas textbook you have something there to start with, a framework around which you can build, something to push against with your wiki. We don’t have that. We don’t have a place to start. And our universities are winding down and even eliminating the humanities, because they are not commercial.

Link Fail. No banana for you to just look at!

I feel like religious people who are so opposed to stem cell research should be able to say a prayer for the fetuses and let them go without holding back the scientific frontier.

See, that’s a big part of the problem. People don’t understand the difference between an “embryo” (a small cluster of undifferentiated cells, the vast majority of which don’t develop to term even in nature) and a “fetus” (the not-quite-fully-developed babies that pro-life demonstrators put on their protest signs).

Fetuses are not being destroyed for embryonic stem cell research. If allowing an embryo to die is the same thing as an abortion then the big guy upstairs runs the biggest back-alley clinic of them all.

but…

The US *is* a republic. Except for a few small areas of the country and/or for a few local issues this is a representative republic, not a democracy.

This is, of course, totally tangental to the subject at hand. While it happens to be true that the united states is not (and has never been) a democracy, the truth rarely has bearing on this kind of political game-playing. This is an effort to skew what is being taught towards one side of the current political spectrum (and I say current because in a few years the issues will be totally different; keeping these books for much longer is likely to result in the kind of pedagogy you expected from soviet states, with the repetition of outdated and only vaguely related pseudo-marxist catchphrases as the only safe response (the difference being that rather than quoting early 20th century interpretations of a 19th century economist’s ideas, it’ll be quoting early 21st century interpretations of a mid-20th century hack writer)).

While there is no reason to believe that textbooks are likely ever to consist mostly of facts (as the son of a historian, I know that the facts involved in a balanced understanding of even a minor situation are rarely clear enough for a dedicated student to understand after years), we should at least try to keep the lies we teach our children about history balanced and current (or if not current, at least not current to some definable bygone age, like the leisure suit).

the US is technically a republic

No, this is not a technical subject.

Demokratia and res publica are not technical terms invented by technicians to delineate clearly defined and distinct parts of some kind of Venn diagram.

An electron is a “lepton” and not a “baryon.” Period. Note that there is no debate about this.

The United States is/are a “democracy” and/or a “republic,” or both, or neither. Depending on the point you’re trying to make, or which party you’re trying to recruit for, or which specious argument you heard first, or which specious argument you heard most recently. So shut up, all of you.

Thanks, Doug. This made my day.

Because votes can be manipulated so easily on a large scale by the media, and because media firms are vast cash-processing machines, only those with cash need apply.

For an extreme example of how stupid liberals can also be just look at the requirements for New York State Hunter Safety courses. This year the course requirements deleted the First Aid requirement so that a segment on Sexual Harassment could be inserted.

Hmmm… lack of common sense maybe? Someone gets injured while hunting and their buddies might not know how to stop their bleeding, or splint a broken limb, but they will know how not to sexually harass them! Awesome! Way to go, clueless partisan bureaucrat! Now I can take my 12 year old who is not at all interested in sex yet and introduce him to the subject, just so he can hunt.

The best policy is to include all sides and let the kids figure out what they think the truth is. Problem is that too many people think that group think is the best way to move society forward (and I’m not giving Liberals, Conservatives, Socialists, Democrats, Republicans, or any other special interest group a pass on that statement).