As we all know, Advanced Placement U.S. History will make you want to join ISIS, so the Koch Brothers have an alternative curriculum that paints a very different picture.
Even though our sainted founders owned slaves and included slavery in the founding of the country, the Koch Brothers’ curriculum makes it clear that an asterisk should have been included when they said ‘all men are created equal.’
via TPM
“Some say that the Declaration’s authors didn’t mean to include everyone when they wrote ‘all men are created equal.’ They say that Jefferson and the Continental Congress just meant to include white men who owned property. But this is not true. Jefferson and the Continental Congress did not believe that there was a natural class of rulers, and they asserted that the colonists had the same right to rule themselves as the people of England,” an essay in the curriculum asserts.
“Slavery was an important economic and social institution in the United States,” the essay continues. “The Founders understood that they would have to tolerate slavery as part of a political compromise. They did not see a way to take further action against slavery in their lifetimes, though many freed their slaves after their deaths.”
It’s contradictory to assert that our founders did not believe in slavery or that some men are not equal while acknowledging that the founders owned slaves and codified it during the nation’s founding.
Slaves were not counted as whole human beings under the 3/5ths compromise, which necessarily designates white people as a “class of rulers,” and slaves were not counted as colonists. These are facts of historical record that the Koch Brothers curriculum attempts to white-wash.
Conservative critics of accurate history seem to think that we cannot appreciate the founding of our country while also acknowledging its faults. They don’t believe you can walk and chew gum at the same time because they cannot.
Acknowledging our faults is called “anti-American” by conservatives who seemingly believe that nothing short of sainthood is good enough for America.
I’m not even sure what to call that. It’s too ignorant to be snobby. It’s reverse elitism.
I also suspect they want you to believe the nation was perfect from the beginning to discourage you from questioning the status-quo today. Conservatives are adamantly opposed to the idea that the constitution is a living document that needs to evolve over time. For them, the Second Amendment is sacrosanct but the Fourteenth is questionable.