For some time now, a mini-controversy has been roiling around the eccentric actions of the Texas Board of Education. At issue are the efforts of a regressivist majority on that body to tinker with the approved language of school textbooks to be used in the Lone Star State over the next decade. You can find many internet references to at least some of the specific changes the Board approved last Friday (May 21), but I think it's fair to say they tend toward conservatism, both political and religious.
The above-linked article by Michael Brick is fairly restrained in its summary:
Last year, conservatives on the board changed the state science curriculum to undermine the teaching of evolution, cell formation and the Big Bang.
While many of the changes to the science curriculum used coded language to advance conservative principles, some additions to the history standards were more overtly political. Board members planned to add language requiring high school students of the civil rights movement to “describe the role of individuals such as governors George Wallace, Orval Faubus, and Lester Maddox and groups, including the Congressional bloc of southern Democrats, that sought to maintain the status quo.”
In another passage, the board would require students to explain the roles of “Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.”
Many groups have expressed concern, often approaching outrage, about these changes because the publishers of school textbooks have historically tailored their texts for the entire country to the parochial tastes of Texas. (That's because Texas is big, folks.)
Personally I don't agree with some of the changes that passed last week, but I suspect the dangers of the Board's textual deviation are being much exaggerated. Several of these arch-conservatives have already been voted out, so their work can be redone if necessary. Publishers these days can easily produce different editions of textbooks for different regional "tastes," and surely will be required by other states to to so. Technologically, textbooks are obsolete, and I'm not so sure kids really pay much attention to what's in their school books.
And if they do, isn't it perhaps OK for them to learn - to take one example - a little bit about such opponents of desegregation as Lester Maddox or OrvaI Faubus? If nothing else, our sons and daughters will be wowed to discover that there once was a culture that named people Orval and Lester. And I think students and pupils today will probably see through any attempt to rehabilitate the segregationist image; even the briefest consideration of the record will make clear these guys weren't heroes and weren't admirable.
There's another reason to make them a part of the curriculum, though. These politicians of the past receded into obscurity for a reason. The forward progress of mankind brushed them almost unnoticed from the road of history like an armadillo hit by a speeding pick-up truck. Their obstructionist and regressive views were discredited, but just as there are neo-Nazi groups around the world today, there are Lester Maddoxes and even Jefferson Davises at large in the land, and people who romanticize them. They're the Texas Board of Education crowd, and the current Attorneys-General of several states (including my current state, Virginia) who seek to refight old battles by petitioning to have health care reform declared unconstitutional; and the Governor of Texas (Texas again?) who's trying to defy U.S. law in order to give polluters more wiggle room.
Thus, the political lesson of the Texas Schoolbook caper is that voter apathy can allow an organized minority of wackos to take over. I'm sure that a lot of Texans didn't think very hard about the significance of the state Board of Education, or even go vote. I don't have kids in my local school system so I don't really bother to find out what candidates for my county school board are planning, but I should - it can be important. The hijacking of the Texas school board had a precursor in a similar takeover in Kansas a few years ago (that's when, if you recall, Kansas officials declared creationism should be taught in schools there in lieu of evolution. With elections pending in an atmosphere of extreme partisanship, anti-incumbent mood, and tea-partyism, voters should avoid the temptation to wallow in their own economic problems, and never suppose that any office up for grabs "doesn't matter." They should look at the issues, find out what's what, and go vote in primaries and in the general election.
Beyond that political lesson, all the to-do about Texas schoolbooks is more laughable than serious. So the state that gave us the Inarticulate President has a bunch of clowns on its Board of Education? Har har, who cares? Well... except for those poor Texans who would rather their state not be a national joke, or who would like to see their kids educated in science rather than religious opinion, and in history rather than political bias. They should take this seriously, and do something about it.
For the rest of us, let's remember the role played in 1963 by the Texas School Book Depository in one attempt to resist progress; now perhaps we should label this episode the Texas School Book Suppository, to give the Texas B of E a hint as to what the rest of the country would like them to do with their curriculum tweaks.