The Texas Board of Education has approved an academic curriculum that presents a “conservative” viewpoint of history. It stresses the “superiority” of American capitalism and questions the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a secular government without state sponsored religion according to an article in the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News. This blog will not be about college news per se, but I think this topic is relevant regarding the state of education in our country. As a former university Lecturer, these changes to the public academic curriculum should be aired and discussed.
Why is this important? It is of great importance, not only in Texas, but to the entire country since Texas is one of the largest markets for textbooks….textbook companies will want to publish books that Texas will buy. Ever heard the term, “history is written by the winners”? That phrase is true to an extent, which is why academia is so invaluable. Constant research and testing and deconstruction of theorums and hypotheses and history is how we continue to learn and grow and understand our past. How can a Board of Education, without academicians, historians, or even economists make changes to not only state history, but world history? I don’t mean to be argumentative, but look at how wonderfully Abstinance Only Sex Education has worked in Texas! Texas has the second highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.
“In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.”
I understand. I dealt with these issues when I taught at the university level. I taught a course that required discussion of ancient religions and deities, and one of the students stood up and announced to the class that the earth was only 8,000 years old and all of the information I was giving was false. “Okay,” I said, “you have an absolute right to believe whatever you want. HOWEVER, this information will be on the midterm, so I suggest you learn it.”
What is education, after all? I believe that education is the imparting of information. We can all believe whatever we want to, but if you do not know all of the available information how can you make a decision about what to believe? Perhaps a person wants to ignore all information that does not “ring true” with their beliefs. That is not being educated, that is being dogmatic. And people have a perfect right in this country to choose that kind of education by going to a private school, being homeschooled, or going to a religious collegiate institution. But for public education? No. My tax dollars should not be spent on any political agenda in education.
The article in the New York Times goes on, “Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist. They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.” So our students will study the Alamo, but they won’t learn about the Hispanics who died alongside the whites.
Some of the items are sort of like a comedy routine by George Carlin:
“Capitalism” will be replaced in all texts by “free enterprise system” because capitalism has a bad connotation to it.
Thomas Jefferson will no longer be included in a list of writers from the 18th and 19th century who inspired democratic reforms. Why? Because Thomas Jefferson coined the term, “separation of church and state” in discussing the first amendment of the constitution. Removing Thomas Jefferson from the list of enlightenment writers is like taking Einstein out of the list of relativity theorum Mathematicians! He is being replaced by Protestant reformation writers like John Calvin.
The Dallas Morning News: “For example, high school students will learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s – but not about liberal or minority rights groups. Board members also rejected requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy and new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage.”
There are some changes I think are fair, I certainly won’t rehash the entire article, but I think it is fine to educate students about Malcom X and the Black Panthers as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. It is fine to present different economic theories. But taking Thomas Jefferson OUT? Maybe we should remove him from the list of US Presidents, too.
*Here is the link to the responses to the article at the NYT.
