Catholic Legislative Network leginfo@cacatholic on A Black-American Experience: Urge Governor Brown to Veto SB 48–Keep Lawmakers Away from Textbooks

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URGE Governor Brown to Veto SB 48 – Keep Lawmakers Away from TextbooksTake Action!
Professionals, Teachers, Historians Should Determine Curriculum

Politicians are not the right people to determine school curricula – whether in science or social studies. Educational professional, working with teachers and parents and school boards, are better able to instruct our children.

SB 48 (Leno) Instruction: prohibition of discriminatory content would be yet another political idea imposed on the public school curriculum—a mandate “prohibitingdiscriminatory content” in history lessons. Laws promoting acceptance and tolerance of those with diverse heritage, racial identity, sexual orientation, religious conviction or physical ability are already in statute. A law which micromanages the study of history for political correctness is both unwise and dangerous.

As the Los Angeles Times editors wrote on April 12, 2011, letting politicians write our history could lead students to a skewed perception of historical reality: “Minority groups, the elderly and the disabled must be represented proportionally and never portrayed in a bad light. People in poor countries aren’t supposed to be show as poor, lest they be stereotyped… So poor people aren’t poor and the elderly are physicallyfit and financially sound, according to the textbooks…Fables don’t make for solid instruction. History is the great story of people, groups and movements—their faults aswell as their accomplishments—shaping the world up through the events of today. It is a story best told by historians, not by politicians.”

TAKE ACTION now to ask Governor Brown to veto SB 48.