The Texas Board of Education should not have adopted the new social studies curriculum

Thank you for your quick response! "Is this not not only promoting open mindedness, but allowing the students to have a totally unbaised perspective of history?" Perhaps you misunderstood what they meant. It doesn't mean that they would otherwise be saying that the separation of church and state is a good thing because of so and so, it means that otherwise they would be saying that the separation of church and state exists, and this is why they decided to do that. That way they can formulate their opinions with the knowledge of what the founders had in mind. "I beleive that through removing the biased opinions that have been stated IN history, we are having a clearer view of what actually occured during these time periods." History without opinions is like math without numbers. In math without numbers, you are left with formulas and ideas, but no way to truly understand and use the math. If one was to take all of the opinions out of history and social studies, all that you could get out of the study is the raw ideas, and none of the enrichment or applications involved with the opinions. Not to say they should say whether the opinions are right or wrong, they should just present the opinions and rationale as to why these things happened or why people thought they should. Otherwise you could ultimately end up with a history book that tells you that Hitler killed 21 million people, but it wouldn't be able to tell you why he thought that was a good idea, or why nobody else thought it was a good idea. So you basically end up with a book about a bunch of people doing random things for no reason and with no reaction. That's crazy. But you've sent me on a tangent. Texas isn't doing that. What they're doing is cutting out or significantly reducing the coverage of certain areas of history that are in any way detrimental to their political agenda, which certainly does remove some opinions here and there, such as the rationale behind the separation of church and state. "I beleive that through removing the biased opinions that have been stated IN history, we are having a clearer view of what actually occured during these time periods." (Yes, I am aware that I used the same quote twice. I am just looking at it from a different perspective). There is no way to write something without a bias unless you literally list out facts without any commentary whatsoever. Then, as I said in the last section, that's not helpful. But even if you could remove the bias, that doesn't mean removing historical facts. "I urge you to find a history textbook that shows all of the instances where blacks harmed white civilians." All of the instances? That happens all the time. Whites also harm blacks all the time. Whites also harm whites all the time, and so on. That's just life. But once again, this really has very little bearing on what Texas is doing. Whether or not blacks have harmed whites, they were still kept as slaves, and they still fought for their rights. That rhymed. "You must understand that when this school board wishes to change the textbooks, they are not changing history, rather, they are simply showing another side of the story of our country." How is it showing "a different side of the story of our country" by removing facts from the textbook? There was once a man named Saparmurat Niyyazov. He was president of Turkmenistan until 2006 when he passed away. While he was president, he literally changed the history books in his favor. He even renamed the months and the days of the week after himself and his mother. After he passed away, his successor, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, had to reverse a lot of those changes, but there is still a huge cult of Niyyazov's personality because it's made such a big impact on the Turkmen culture. Now, I know that Texas isn't going that far, but the reason I bring this up is (a) Texas is officially changing what is taught to students, thus creating a generation of people who will be growing up with a propagandous education, and (b) I really wanted to use Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov's name in a debate. "Finally, I would like to point out that the USA is NOT a full democracy, it is technically a constitututional republic, so I do not see why this is an issue." It's not a huge issue, it just is. I think that the fact that they specified that is worse than the use of the term. I usually use the term "representative federalist democracy," because that is what I see the U.S. as, but constitutional republic is also a valid term. But I don't think that it is a big enough deal that that should have been a stipulation. But that's certainly not the biggest issue at hand and more of a distraction than anything. As I've said, it's not so much a matter of neutrality as it is a matter of facts. As a textbook, it should certainly be enriched with opinions from both sides, but first and foremost, they should provide students with facts. They should provide students with facts from all of the important areas of history, good or bad for the political agenda of those approving the textbooks. I am looking forward to your response!