Defenders of the new social studies standards just passed by the Texas SBOE say it will encourage students to go back to the Constitution and First Amendment to learn about religious freedom. WallBuilders founder and president David Barton was among the six advisers the Board brought in to help rewrite the standards.

Bill Bumpas – OneNewsNow

An American history expert says the social studies curriculum recently approved by the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) is the best he’s seen since before World War II.

Defenders of the new social studies standards just passed by the Texas SBOE say it will encourage students to go back to the Constitution and First Amendment to learn about religious freedom. WallBuilders founder and president David Barton was among the six advisers the Board brought in to help rewrite the standards.

“You should present history has it happened — the good, the bad, the ugly; the right, the left, the center; the anything else that is out there,” argues the Christian historian. “And I think that’s the final product that we got, despite all the media clamor to the otherwise.  When you just read the standards, they’re extremely balanced, extremely fair, and extremely thorough.”

Barton explains to OneNewsNow that the standards will have students examine the founding documents.

“They have to spend a week every year on 12 grade levels studying the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration [of Independence]; and memorizing lengthy segments from those documents,” he says.

According to Barton, not everyone is pleased with that requirement. “…These standards really are a throwback,” he points out, “and this is pretty scary to a lot of people who want to see America change fundamentally in a new direction.”

The WallBuilders founder explains that among the new standards is a focus on “American exceptionalism.”

“There is a reason that we’re the only nation in the world that does not average a revolution every 30 to 40 years; there’s a reason that we have four percent of the world’s population [and] 25 percent of the world’s wealth,” he notes.

And an emphasis on individuals, not groups. “…I think that’s a real positive thing for kids not to feel like they have to be a part of identity politics, that they have to belong to some group or have to be identified by some group,” Barton concludes. “We want them to be identified as Americans.”

The new standards, which will be in place for the next ten years, also include an amendment in the curriculum comparing and contrasting the phrase “separation of church and state” with the Founding Fathers’ intent to protect religious freedom. Because Texas is a large textbook market, other school districts around the country frequently buy the same education materials.

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