This is a sad attempt to cover up the fact that the Southerners, namely most of the Founding Fathers, once thought it was OK to own people. Does the Tea Party think that if it isn't written in books or learned at school it didn't happen? By ignoring slavery, they ignore the reason our nation is the way it is.
Part of why the Tea Party thinks they can rule out slavery is due to the fact that "the Texas Board of Education approved revisions to its Social Studies curriculum that would put a conservative twist on history through revised textbooks and teaching standards" (HP article mentioned before). How scary is that? A group of people was so influential that textbooks will now contain material either excluding slavery or making slavery seem acceptable.
My question is this: if young people aren't taught the mistakes of the past, how can they be expected to produce a better future?
Part of why the Tea Party thinks they can rule out slavery is due to the fact that "the Texas Board of Education approved revisions to its Social Studies curriculum that would put a conservative twist on history through revised textbooks and teaching standards" (HP article mentioned before). How scary is that? A group of people was so influential that textbooks will now contain material either excluding slavery or making slavery seem acceptable. My question is this: if young people aren't taught the mistakes of the past, how can they be expected to produce a better future?
I agree with the main point of your post, but the truth is that this sort of behavior isn't limited to just the Tea Party. I would say that just about all of the political parties out there do what they can to shape history in a way that confirms and glorifies their positions. For example, as much as members of the Occupy Wall Street movement try to blame capitalism for everything wrong in the world, they neglect the fact that historically, it has been capitalism that has brought people out of poverty and made society richer as a whole. And I have heard countless arguments about things like the New Deal that ignore the historical record in an attempt to elevate FDR. So this sort of bending and twisting around the historical truth stems from both sides of the political spectrum.
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