By now, it may be old news to you that the Texas State Board of Education is gearing up to re-write history with a decidedly conservative bent. In January, the board obtained approval for an amendment requiring high school U.S. history students to know more about Phyllis Schlafly than Thomas Jefferson. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Last Friday, the Board approved right-wing alterations to what most students in the state will be studying in history, social-studies and economics classes. It’s all being done, they say, to counter “leftist influences” in history texts. What they are doing is expunging progressive leaders and erasing the contributions of minorities.
The board seeks to place a greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.” That means texts will include increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, and more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
Member Mary Helen Berlanga stormed out of Friday’s meeting in protest after efforts by Latin@ board members to highlight more Latin@ figures were consistently defeated. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
The new recommendations stress the need for a more positive portrayal of America’s economic superiority. Terms deemed too ideologically loaded are being retired in favor of Newspeak. “Imperialism” is giving way to “expansionism,” and “free enterprise system” will replace “capitalism.”
In the curriculum’s preferred language, Title IX and affirmative action are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences.” Because, in her words, “the topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” conservative board member Barbara Cargill introduced an amendment requiring the teaching of “the importance of personal responsibility for life choices” in a section on teenage suicide, dating violence, sexuality, drug use and eating disorders. It passed.
Heavy emphasis is to be placed on the founding fathers having been (allegedly) guided by strict Christian beliefs. Thomas Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is to be dropped from the list of writers influencing the country’s intellectual origins. Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas and Puritan theologian John Calvin will replace him.
Confederate General Stonewall Jackson is listed as a role model for effective leadership and Communist witch-hunter Joe McCarthy is vindicated. Country and western music is listed as one of the nation’s important cultural movements. Hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
It’s easy to say, oh, it’s Texas; what do you expect? But the revised Texas standards have implications for students all across the country. The print run for Texas textbooks is so large that most districts in other states adopt the same course materials. Effectively, the Texas School Board spells out requirements for the majority of the nation’s textbook market. This scares me to death. It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to unschool my hypothetical children.
After a period for public comment, the board will vote on final recommendations in May. Please let your voice be heard. This decision must be fought for the sake of the students and the nation’s future.
If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry:
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Please to STFU, Texas State Board of Education. Some of us are trying to have a civilization here.
Holy shit. Not that I have any love for Jefferson, but dropping him in favor of Thomas Aquinas is just intellectually insane. Seriously.
And I love how history has a “leftist” bent. It’s not that the historians are leftist though, so much as that the truth pretty much vindicates liberals.
@Cimorene: That’s so true and it’s exactly what I say when people bitch about how left-wingers are all overeducated, pointy-headed intellectuals. I mean, yeah, the more knowledge you have and the more you learn about the world the LESS likely you are to be a right-winger. It’s telling, no?
Country and western music was really important to the political history of the US, especially as applied to populism, the labor movement, and the changing idea of the family, but somehow I strongly doubt that is what they meant.
As a Texan, though, I can say that no change in the textbooks is going to make that much difference in the quality of the history education provided to Texan high school students, all of my humanity classes were taught by coaches who had to teach something to stay employed. Let’s just say we spent a lot of time watching movies, and almost no time learning history. That was ten years ago, and it probably hasn’t gotten better since then. But my alma mater is a baseball powerhouse; Go Jackets! /snark
Not saying that hip hop isn’t equally important, of course!
Why can’t they just be honest and name the chapter on personal responsibility the “It was all your fault, you dirty dirty whore” chapter and be done with it? I don’t even need to see the textbook to know what that chapter will say, word for FUCKING word.
Ladies and gentlemen, reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Sadly, as a former Texas student, I can tell you Texas history was already poorly taught. Not it will be poorly taught with an ideological bent. I mean, the Texas history course I took in the 7th grade basically ignored the fact that the Mexicans and Native Americans were here before Anglos. Sam Houston and Stephen F. Austin were put on a pedestal. The fact that the Anglos came to Texas, looked around, decided they liked it, and took (stole) the land was never really discussed.
Of course, some history teachers will teach history without bias. They just won’t have the textbook to support them.
This is a petition to the major textbook publishers to stand up to the Texas Board of “Education”:
Yeah, not so good with the hyperlinks…
http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/textbooks/?r_by=8258-2528976-CwPMF8x&rc=confemail1
KJ:
I also thought it was hilarious that they glossed over the fact many of the founders of the Republic wanted to join the US from the beginning, but the US wasn’t having it and made Texas wait. That is spun differently in Texas history.
Shouldn’t California have about equal influence over textbooks? I keep hearing that Texas is so big that textbook printers cater to them, but isn’t CA about as big?
@AvOgaro: After California, Texas is the biggest buyer of textbooks. However, among other things, the financial crisis in Cali has them putting off purchasing new books until at least 2014.
I think my insides just twisted. And this is OK?!?
@AvOgaro: I should also add that Cali also has some textbook standards t most other states don’t follow, but also makes those books more expensive than average.
These combined factors make it a win-win for those in Texas that want to spread their influence the rest of this country.
I frequently think we need a national education system to redress the crazy imbalances in the system we have now. But this is exactly the stuff that makes me bite my tongue: if we get a national education system it will be Texas’s system, not one that involves any, you know, education.
Also this is the perfect example of education as a tool for pacifying the people. For perfect control, educate your population just a little, and just sanctioned stuff. If you teach nothing, the people will teach among themselves, and it will be out of govt. control. Can’t have that. If you teach the people too well, they will turn their questions on the government. Can’t have that either.
Instead, stroke their egos, teach them about how great we are! Teach them about how our way is better than all other ways! Teach them about how we have it so much better than anybody else, what kind of person would ask for change!?! Teach them never to complain, everything is perfect, teach them never to question or to think …
At another time I would have said, that’s how things are done in (Latin American Country I have some connections to) but after observing my kids’ education (in suburban NY, in supposedly great schools, never mind Texas) I have to add the US to the list of places where this passes for education.
finally, (I promise) I think there’s some technical reason other states don’t use CA text books, even though that market is bigger than Texas’s market. Could it be that CA requires a certain amount of CA specific stuff in their books? I had NY specific history in 8th grade: Iroquois Nation etc.
@bellacooker: Rockwall?
I wouldn’t say my history teachers were exceptional, but they were not as bad as other Texans here make out. And they were coaches. I did hear from my social studies teacher parent that the situation got worse after I graduated, but I can’t imagine it being that bad. Yes, I learned that the Civil War was fought for State’s Rights and that the Dixie Flag isn’t a symbol of racism: the latter is flat out wrong, but an honest mistake by someone who was a bit ignorant of others’ perspective, but the former isn’t wrong, it’s simply a mangled simplification.
@KJ: Stephen F Austin was a legal settler of lands opened up by the Mexican government. Probably were inhabited by American Indians, but the American settlers didn’t make a habit of stealing the land-that was for the Mexican government to do at that time. It is worthy to note that those who died in the Alamo were fighting for the Mexican Constitution of 1824, not an independent Texas run by American settlers.
@bellacooker: I don’t remember being told that Sam Houston fought for a defiantly independent Republic of Texas. Everything I learned in public high school informed me of his strong desire for Texas to be part of the union, even to the extreme of being divided into five different territories. (And funnily, the original Republic includes lands which are now part of four other states, but I’m sure you knew that.)
I don’t deny that the public education system needs improvement, nor that this hogwash from the Board is anything other than last ditch attempts to keep Texas set in the 1950s. But then again, most Texans think this too. And I’m not trying to white-wash Texan history either, plenty of abuses and naked power struggles to be had (the most ludicrous might be Polk using a faulty reading of the Texan Treaty with Mexico as reason for the Mexican American War). I’m just saying, my experience far from mirrored yours, and we shouldn’t be pasting the entire Texan education system as run by creationist-right wing ideological purists.
This is just the best example of what happens when intelligent and semi-intelligent people choose to ignore local politics in favor of the “big game.”
I’m not American so I’m wondering are people hired specifically to be coaches there? I mean are they paid for coaching? I’m wondering about the comment that coaches had to teach something to stay employed. Were the coaches not trained as teachers? Here teachers aren’t paid extra for coaching. They just do it as part of the teaching job.
“Yes, I learned that the Civil War was fought for State’s Rights and that the Dixie Flag isn’t a symbol of racism: the latter is flat out wrong, but an honest mistake by someone who was a bit ignorant of others’ perspective, but the former isn’t wrong, it’s simply a mangled simplification.”
Actually, no. Southerners claimed to care about “states’ rights” when it was southern states making decisions to practice slavery, but when northern states made decisions about slavery—for instance, that the northern state constituted free soil, and anyone within the state border was a free person who could not be dragged back to slavery—then the southerners yelled for the federal government to make us send escaped slaves back.
The Civil War was about slavery. Southern leaders were very clear in their speeches and writing of the time that their determination to hold slaves was their reason for secession. Check it: Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union, circa 1861.
Secondly, yes, the land later known as Texas was inhabited by Indians. That means that American settlers did indeed steal the land. The Mexican government was itself a thief, and a thief’s permission is not relevant.
So: Yes, AspiringExpatriate, Texan education was that bad. And it now looks to be getting worse and dragging the rest of the country with it.
Lyndsay: Yes, coaching is a paid occupation in the U.S. The thing about coaches and teaching is that in some parts of the U.S., the local authorities care a LOT about sports, more than they do about education. They want to hire a very good, very expensive coach. They can’t actually afford to pay that much money just for a coach, so they subsidize their sporting ambitions by giving the coach a second job as teacher, thus ‘justifying’ two salaries for the same person.
The coach usually gets their second salary for some field that’s hard to judge, like history. This means the students get short-changed on their historical education so that the sports team can have the coach’s full attention.
Wow. And why don’t the coaches just teach gym class? Hmm.
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