Texas has decided to make Cold War anticommunism look better, drop Thomas Jefferson as an intellectual leader, keep country music and drop hip hop. As Yahoo reports today:
The revised standards have far-reaching implications because Texas is a huge market leader in the school-textbook industry. The enormous print run for Texas textbooks leaves most districts in other states adopting the same course materials, so that the Texas School Board effectively spells out requirements for 80 percent of the nation’s textbook market. That means, for instance, that schools in left-leaning states like Oregon and Vermont could soon be teaching from textbooks that are short on references to Ted Kennedy but long on references to conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly.
There is such a simple answer to this strange limitation on what students will be assigned to learn for coming years: put it all on the internet. 
The answer is even simpler than that: it is all already on the internet! Learn, for example, about country music at the Nashville Hall of Fame. National Geographic has an excellent HIP HOP MUSIC online section.
If the Texas subject decisions were about online resources, the kids could study both country music and hip hop. They could get lot broader knowledge on every subject.
