Vision Revision: Re-writing History

Of course, this is nothing new from my perspective - actually I've heard this story quite often, but it's hard not to be outraged by it every time it happens. The Texas school board is reviewing their textbook curricula again.

This might not seem like it has much reach, but due to the fact that Texas is and has been the largest consumer of textbooks for several years now, the textbook makers are listening. Essentially, the way Texas sways causes the publishers to sway with them due to this very fact. California, due to budget problems, has been in no position to purchase new books for their students, and thus, the privilege defaults to Texas.

Texas is an overwhelmingly conservative state, obviously, McCain having garnered over 55% of the popular vote in the 2008 presidential race to Obama's sub-44%. The influence over the textbook publishers of America causes the small offices of the school board to be scrutinized year after year with a few of the changes perceived as being biased.

The slew of them this year is just as alarming as before, at least to me. In years past, the alarm was obviously focused on the science curriculum, with demands that Christian Creationism be taught with just as much credibility as the Darwinian concepts of natural selection and evolution. This year, the changes seem to affect the social studies curriculum primarily, which by no means should be any less scary.

First of all, it's important to understand how the board is made up and what issues are important to them. The fifteen-person board is made up of five Democrats and ten Republicans, and often votes on issues directly down party lines. Seven of the ten Republicans are considered to be part of the "conservative bloc," disliking concepts like separation of church and state and favoring a glorification of capitalism.

So what are the issues this team has addressed and/or modifications they've made? Here's a rundown and my take on each:

1) The addition in history texts of information about the civil rights revolution in America primarily during the 1960s. Specifically, the board wishes to add passages relating to the Black Panthers during this time where most textbooks focus only on the efforts of the less-violent Martin Luther King, Jr. and his organization.

In general, this is not such a bad thing in my mind; just as violence was part of the American Revolution, it was indeed a part of the expansion of civil rights to people of color during the midsection of the twentieth century.As long as they show the dualities of the issue - the shootouts with police of the Black Panthers along with the resurgence of the practice of lynching African Americans during the 1960s - I'm more or less fine with this change. The peaceful movement of MLK in parallel with the more subversive and violent tactics of the Black Panthers. In particular, it's important to show that the civil rights revolution and the American Revolution as related in this way - a group of people fighting for their own rights and achieving their end goals.

One thing to note is the fact that the group wishes to stress that the civil rights legislation was passed with Republican support; this is a dangerous lean, in my opinion. As aforementioned, it's particularly important to show that minorities were the impetus of the civil rights changes and not, as Joe Barton (R-TX) puts it:

“Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.”

Yeah, you guys fought hard with protest, but it's only because of the grace of us rich, white men that you have any rights at all!


2) One that particularly upsets me is the degradation of the concept of separation of church and state. Contrary to much of the evidence, the board wishes to convey that the oft-mentioned Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles when they authored the Constitution, and that America's founding and Christianity are inextricably linked. Actually, they've gone so far as to exclude mention of Thomas Jefferson as an influence on subsequent revolutions, as he was the one who initially coined the term "separation of church and state". Instead they focus more on Aquinas and Calvin.

3) Particularly distressing is the new treatment of Japanese internment during World War II. The board called for a specific statement about Italians and Germans also being interned during the same time period to try and downplay the racist overtones of this internment. Of course racism had nothing to do with it, right? Anyway, it is pretty important to mention German and Italian internment as well, but ensure that the scales are also mentioned. Only 3,000 Italians were arrested an interned during the war, compared to 11,507 Germans and the largest group, the Japanese, with 120,000. Ethnic Japanese were thus almost 90% of those in internment camps. Obviously, there's a huge differential here - the fact that race had something to do with these numbers is not mitigated by the fact that ethnic Japanese were not the sole target.

There are others, such as the additions of Friedman to a list of influential economists and adding more information to the political history of the 80s and 90s that I don't particularly mind as long as they're kept reigned in somewhat.

One final thing, though, is one of the statements made a few years ago by a David Bradley on the treatment of the English curriculum:

In late 2007, the English language arts writing teams, made up mostly of teachers and curriculum planners, turned in the drafts they had been laboring over for more than two years. The ultraconservatives argued that they were too light on basics like grammar and too heavy on reading comprehension and critical thinking. “This critical-thinking stuff is gobbledygook,” grumbled David Bradley, an insurance salesman with no college degree, who often acts as the faction’s enforcer.

Wow. To me, that's particularly chilling.