‘Partisan Doctrine’ in Classes Targeted by Bill in the Arizona State Senate
Read the article here.
Teachers who promote “partisan doctrine” in the classroom would be automatically fired, and districts that allow it would lose state funding, under a proposed law approved Wednesday by a Senate panel.
The 5-2 vote by the Committee on Government Reform came after Sen. Lori Klein, R-Anthem [R-Littlepinkhandgun], said she has received complaints about “political indoctrination in the classroom.”
Klein said SB 1202 is designed to ensure students are given a balanced view on what they are being taught.
But the measure appears to be aimed largely at the Tucson Unified School District amid charges that, despite the decision to scrap controversial ethnic- studies courses, students are still being taught history and social studies in a biased fashion.
[…]
In other words, they’re still teaching the history of brown people in Arizona, not just white people.
[…]
Several legislators said they were troubled by the wording of the legislation, questioning whether the word “partisan” was too broad.
Klein said it is justified, saying it simply means promoting one point of view, whether Democrat or Republican.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“Republicans or conservatives should not be promoting their point of view,” Klein said. “Liberals, socialists, Marxists should not be espousing their views in the classroom.”
Sen. David Lujan, D-Phoenix, said he fears unintended consequences.
“Any history, social studies teacher who asks their students to read books about any president of the United States could be determined partisan,” he said.
Sen. Frank Antenori, R-Tucson, acknowledged the concern. He got committee members to strip the legislation of any penalty for use of partisan books.
And Klein said she is willing to look at narrowing the scope of what would get a teacher in trouble.
“This is not meant to deter a teacher from teaching social studies or history,” she said. What is is designed to stop, said Klein, is “revisionist history.”
[…]
Lujan, however, said he was more concerned about other programs that might be affected.
For example, if a science teacher raised the question of global warming, Lujan said, “that could be considered a partisan issue.”
But Sen. Rick Murphy, R-Glendale, said, “As long as the teacher was tolerant of people having other views and not punitive towards them if they express those and try to persuade their classmates of that, and as long as it’s relevant, I don’t see a problem with that.”
I guess teaching history could be seen as promoting racial hatred. Depends on how you look at it. You could say that what was done in the past was promoting racial hatred, and Arizona politicians don’t want the kids to find out about it.
The Mexican Repatriation refers to a mass migration that took place between 1929 and 1939, when as many as 500,000 people of Mexican descent were forced or pressured to leave the US.[1] The event, carried out by American authorities, took place without due process.[2] Some 35,000 were deported, amongst many hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who were deported during this period. The Immigration and Naturalization Service targeted Mexicans because of “the proximity of the Mexican border, the physical distinctiveness of mestizos, and easily identifiable barrios.” [3]
The Repatriation is not widely discussed in American history textbooks;[4] in a 2006 survey of the nine most commonly used American history textbooks in the United States, four did not mention the Repatriation, and only one devoted more than half a page to the topic.[4] Nevertheless, many mainstream textbooks now carry this topic, while subsequently ignoring other mass deportations and repatriations of European immigrants. In total,they devoted four pages to the Repatriation, compared with eighteen pages for the Japanese American internment[4] which affected only one-tenth as many people.[1]…
Better revise that, before the kids see it!