Post Class-Habermas

I really enjoyed the piece by Habermas that we discussed in class on Wednesday. Some of the key terms we pulled out of his reading were: modern, avant-gardism, traditionalism vs. Avant-gardism, and finally, culture. The two that really stood out to me were modern and the word culture. They both related to a bigger idea that resonated with me during the class presentation, the idea that Habermas was arguing that we always want history to look better, so we end up re-writing it; in a sense, re-writing the past kind of through our own eyes or how we want others to see something. A quote from his piece that relates to this idea is "the relation between modern and classical has definitely lost a fixed historical reference." (99) When I heard this idea in class about wanting to make history look better, I automatically connected this to the debate in Texas over whether or not slavery should be included in their U.S. history textbooks. I went to school in Texas up until the 4th grade and I personally do remember learning about some aspects of slavery however now, a handful of rather conservative people in Texas quietly plotted to rewrite history and reshape the education -- and the minds -- of nearly five million young Texans. They even tried to remove Thomas Jefferson from a list of American history's key thinkers. He was one of the founding architects of the modern philosophy of church/state separation, as well as the author of that obscure document called the Declaration of Independence. So naturally he had to go. That move failed. In 2010, Texas spent about 1 billion dollars buying books for their school districts. Book orders that large tend to influence, if not dictate, what goes onto the pages in those textbooks not just in Texas, but nationwide. You'd think that conservatives who advocate for smaller government would cringe at the thought of allowing state government bureaucrats to use their power to brainwash the minds of young students. But I guess they missed that part of their neo-con class, which relates to Bell's piece on Neoconservatives. It is just so crazy to me to think that a small group of people could end up changing the way an entire state's young population views U.S. History, especially the Civil War, and not learn about slavery. It is mind-blowing that they have plan to leave out something that is so crucial to our country's history.