After years of trying and failing to inject creationism into the science curriculum, conservative members of the Texas Board of Education have found another way to promote their agenda. The recently revised social studies syllabus (history, government and economics) of Texas schools now will reflect a clear slant toward right wing conservative views of America's past, present and future. If one believes that what students learn in school does not matter much then the revisions are not noteworthy. However, the changes are being widely viewed as an ideological attempt to influence young minds through distortion, omission and promotion of selected facts. The story has made quite a splash in the news media. (see the reports in the Houston Chronicle and in the NYT)
Although my own children did not attend Texas schools, for many years I have watched with some amusement and considerable consternation the ridiculous attempts by some Texas Republicans to push their religious and political views on school children. The chairman of the board, Don McLeroy is a committed Christian creationist and most other Republicans on the board openly harbor similar views. McLeroy has thankfully been "unelected" but not before he has used his clout to do the harm he always wanted to do. The suspicion that the latest changes are a well orchestrated culture war is confirmed by the following statement of Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister appointed as a reviewer by the conservative camp on the school board.
"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it."
After several days of contentious bickering, the right wing members of the board, voting as a bloc, managed to get their way, thwarting the more moderate and liberal voices. This is some of what they managed to include or exclude.
_ Emphasize the Christian beliefs of the Founding Fathers and downplay their philosophical commitment to a secular approach to governance.
_ Thomas Jefferson has been ditched in favor of St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Blackstone, presumably because he was a proponent of the separation of church and state.
_ The US is to be referred to in the books as a "constitutional republic" as opposed to a "democratic republic."
_ Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president during the US Civil War gets equal time as Abraham Lincoln.
_ Include the role of the Black Panther organization in the civil rights movement in addition to the non-violent nature of MLK's leadership. The history of the Ku Klux Klan around the same time in the south has been jettisoned.
_ As originally intended, the Republican majority on the board did not succeed in dropping Thurgood Marshall from the list of worthy Americans. But they doggedly resisted efforts to include many Latino figures including the resident Tejanos who fought alongside Anglo soldiers at the Alamo. (Texas has a higher number of Latino residents than does California)
_ Republican stalwarts like Joseph McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly (!!!) made the cut and are to be shown in a positive light while labor leader Cesar Chavez came close to getting the heave ho.
_ The role of the NRA in defending American freedom is to be taught to school children. I don't know if the ACLU gets a similar nod.
_ The word "capitalism" has been replaced throughout with the kinder gentler "free enterprise system. ( "Let's face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation," said one conservative member, Terri Leo. "You know, 'capitalist pig!'")
The proposals are now open to public comments for 30 days and if approved, the revised textbooks will be in the classrooms by the fall of 2011. The implications of the changes are worth pondering. It now seems likely that students in the state of Texas which has a very significant Latino and African American population, as also a large pool of immigrant Americans from all over the world, will be exposed to a social studies curriculum which is pointedly right wing Anglo-Christian. Due to its size, the business of text book publication in Texas is huge, so much so that many other states use the same books in their schools. So the effects of the change will be felt beyond Texas borders. Also, text book revisions here take place once every decade. The books will remain in place for ten years.
Actually, I am against unduly influencing young minds with any ideology. The left wing of the political spectrum has done its share of harm with its own agenda driven educational innovations. More important than foisting ideology on our children, we should focus on fashioning a curriculum that interests and challenges our students on all fronts of learning. A new educational initiative proposes to do just that. All US states, except Texas and Alaska have agreed to participate. Apparently, the two largest states, also known for their independent spirit, fear outside interference in deciding what their children should learn. (Perry-Palin ticket in 2016? ) So, it IS about ideology then and not excellence in education. The most disturbing paragraph in the New York Times report is this one:
There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.
One amusing side show of past week's curriculum circus. During the early days of deliberation, two conservative busy-bodies on the board moved to ban the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? from the reading list. The offending book's author Bill Martin Jr shares a name with Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at De Paul University. Although the former is strictly a writer of children's books, Professor Martin recently published a "scary" book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. That was enough for the red baiting ignoramuses to become confused and see red.
What do the authors of the children's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In its haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bearseries never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
I am hardly surprised or shocked that a reactionary bunch that connives to camouflage "capitalism" under the cheery sounding cloak of "free enterprise system" is apt to see a sinister communist / socialist plot lurking behind even a children's book. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? seems to be a lovely book. I would enjoy reading it out aloud to a three or four year old. Why did the school board consider it suitable reading material for the third grade? Now that is an outrage that all school board members should have been opposed to rather than hyperventilating about the possible political affiliations of its author, don't you think?
(Editorial Cartoon by Nick Anderson: click to enlarge)
"Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president during the US Civil War gets equal time as Abraham Lincoln."
It would be bad enough if they were "normal" revisionists, and just wanted to erase him from their history books. That they want to give him more prominence, celebrating him as an equal of Lincoln...
Posted by: prasad | March 15, 2010 at 08:07 AM
Ahhh, Joseph McCarthy and Phyllis Schlafly, my heroes.
Thanks for the summary of this slowly unfolding travesty of education.
Posted by: Cyrus Hall | March 15, 2010 at 10:31 AM
The proposals are not now open to public comment. From the TEA site: "A document containing the extensive revisions will be posted on the Texas Education Agency website and posted in the Texas register by mid-April. Once posted, the official 30-day public comment period will begin."
Shortly after I first read this story, I fired this off to Ruchira:
I'm not really as cocky about this as my knee-jerk response a couple days ago sounds, but I still wonder how much more damaging this will prove to be than the status quo. A curriculum is not a popularity contest. Equal time isn't equal honor. If we crafted curricula exclusively to include our heroes, we'd stand to miss out on quite a bit of history. I'm just saying that the response to the Texans' packing of the court shouldn't necessarily be our own.
The Common Core State Standards Initiative mentioned by Ruchira and produced "on behalf of 48 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia," has to do with English and math, not social studies. Different kettle of fish.
BB,BB,WDYS? is a lovely book and, as you note, Ruchira, it's completely inappropriate for third grade! Our kid stopped "reading" it two years ago, and he just turned four a week ago. See what I mean about the status quo?
Posted by: Dean C. Rowan | March 15, 2010 at 12:36 PM
The status quo is probably not very good, if the third grade reading list contains Bill Martin's Bear books. But that's not the point here. Rather than taking this once-every-decade opportunity to overhaul the curriculum to something better (include the Black Panthers by all means, but don't photo shop the sheet wearing KKK), the board decided to act on ideology. And I doubt that the content is any more worthy. I would have had as many problems with a left leaning, anti-white, anti-Christian, touchy feely, watered down curriculum.
My own experience with history (I studied it only up to 8th grade. After that it was all science and math) in the Indian school system was pathetic - a princely tale of hero worship of various monarchs through the ages - the British viceroys and early independence era Indian leaders included. There was hardly anything about the common people's lives, rural society or the status of the numerous tribes of India. I am finding out much about Indian history at this late age that I never knew. (BTW, for those who may be interested, Ramachandra Guha's India after Gandhi is an excellent book if you have the patience to plow through 750 pages of fact filled account. I am only up to page 200 or so and have already learnt much that I didn't know before) Then there were several attempts by Hindu chauvinists to rewrite history by eliminating all references to Muslim contributions to India's culture, of which there is much in almost all spheres including language, literature, art, music, architecture and food. I call it ill-education.
The Texas revisions are troubling on many fronts. When my children attended a suburban, mostly white school system, I heard many parents and children complain, "We don't have any blacks in our schools. Why do we have to have a holiday for MLK's birthday?" The biases that the Texas SBOE is trying to foster will surely give the impression that Texas is or was white-bread country. The truth is that it never was.
The Common Core curriculum may be a different kettle of fish from social studies. But early education's relation with young minds is akin to water and sponge. You teach a youngster to think sharply and rise to challenges in any field and you are fine tuning their all round BS detector. After solving a particularly vexing math problem, believe me, they will ask questions in the social studies class. The subject matter may be disparate but the ability to think is not compartmentalized.
Posted by: Ruchira | March 15, 2010 at 02:20 PM
After reading the initial articles about the points of contention, I thought maybe the (D) school board members were protesting too much. But after following the links in the article, I see the outrage isn't unjustified.
After all, who particularly cares to learn the names of the Tejanos who fought and died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and other more famous gringos. Names like Juan Nepomuceno Seguín would be too taxing for the likes of SBOE member Barbara Cargill to impose on her 'precious' and 'blessed' children's minds. Note that this lady was/is a science educator, primarily of very young kids (i.e. before they need explanations of Evolution), but chooses to opine on the teaching of sociology:
"In the field of sociology, another conservative member, Barbara Cargill, won passage of 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. "
Also, what's it with conservative dentists who take up school board positions to ruin the curriculum and foist their views upon our children's futures? We had a couple of those types on our school board, which is now mercifully composed of saner elements (still conservative, but not Taliban-crazy.)
If it's true that as Texas textbooks go, so go the nation's textbooks, this would be a major problem. Unless the digital age of publishing textbooks makes it less likely that one state's curriculum would unduly influence that of other states.
Posted by: Sujatha | March 17, 2010 at 03:25 PM
Don't Mess With Textbooks www.thedailyshow.com
Jon Stewart's skewering of the SBOE. What a pity that they have managed to still ram these changes through!
Posted by: Sujatha | March 18, 2010 at 03:40 PM
HI,
The early years of the Cold War saw the United States facing a hostile Soviet Union, the "loss" of China to communism, and war in Korea.
In this politically charged atmosphere, fears of Communist influence over American institutions spread easily.
On February 9, 1950, Joseph McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, claimed that he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were Communists.
I wonder if Joe was about 60 years to early?
How many "Socialist Commie" Czars are in the WH in 2010? Go Figure....
Peace!
Dan
http://josephmccarthy.org
Posted by: Dan | June 08, 2010 at 01:43 PM
Hoffnung auf etwas Unterstützung von Ihnen erhalten, wenn ich Fragen haben.
Posted by: Clen | October 03, 2011 at 02:46 AM
Aber nicht in Deutsch, bitte.
Posted by: Ruchira | October 03, 2011 at 08:50 AM