Teach Your Children Well

One of the recent controversies has been over the the new content standards adopted by the Texas State Board of Education. These kind of things always spark my interest, in part because I used to teach.

In a recent article written by Lauri Lebo and posted at Religious Dispatches [to be found at: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/churchstate/2498/], 10 of the egregious choices made by the school board are noted. These are:

1. Exceptionally Unjust: Conservative board members spent much time stressing that students need to learn about “American exceptionalism,” even as they removed the concepts of “justice” and “responsibility for the common good” from a list of characteristics of good citizenship for Grades 1-3. They also unsuccessfully tried to remove the word “equality.”

2. Disestablishing the Establishment Clause: A proposal suggesting that high school students be able to “examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others,” was rejected by religious conservatives.

3. The Enlightenment Ends Here: Board members voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. Instead, they replaced him with theologians Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Then, because neither were Enlightenment thinkers, board members also removed the word “Enlightenment.”

4. A Free Substitute for Capitalism: Board conservatives banned the word “capitalism” from the standards, arguing that “liberal professors in academia” use the word in a negative way. The phrase “free enterprise” is to be used in its place.

5. McCarthy, Great American Hero: Led by McLeroy, board members voted to require students to learn about “communist infiltration” in the 1950s in an attempt to absolve Joseph McCarthy for his Cold War Communist witch hunts. McLeroy asserted inaccurately that McCarthy has been “vindicated by history.”

6. Expunge the (Brown) Socialist: The board took Dolores Huerta, co-founder of United Farm Workers of America, from a Grade 3 list of “historical and contemporary figures who have exemplified good citizenship,“ because she was a socialist. Inexplicably, socialist Helen Keller remained on the same list.

7. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Conservative: Students are required to learn about “conservative heroes and icons” like Phyllis Schlafly, the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority. No similar standard is required for “liberal heroes and icons.”

8. History, Rewritten by the Losers: When studying the writings of President Abraham Lincoln, eighth-grade students in U.S. history class are also required learn about Jefferson Davis’ inaugural address as president of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

9. Declaring Culture War on Liberal Programs: Students are required to learn about “any unintended consequences” of the Great Society, affirmative action and Title IX.

10. As Goes Hollywood So Goes the Texas School Board: The board removed freedom fighter and Salvadoran archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated during Mass, from a standard about leaders who resisted political oppression. The reason? Because they hadn’t heard of him and, as one board member said, “he didn’t have his own movie” like Nelson Mandela and Mohandas Gandhi.

The primary justification made by some members of the Board for these decisions, and others, was that these were necessary correctives to counter the liberal agenda of professional educators.

I believe that any decision made about what is "truth" in history is affected by one's perspective. I also believe, though, that the people best able to make such choices are those who have spent their professional career studying such things. What would we do, for instance, if a group of people who believe the earth is flat were elected to a state Board of Education? Would we be willing to allow them to rewrite science standards to mandate that students be taught this view? I would not. What about you?