Stop the Texification of Our Texts!
March 11, 2010
Texas may not be seceding from the union politically, but it is doing everything that it can to do so educationally. As the New York Times’s James McKinley reported (www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/us/politics/11texas.html?ref=education), just as the nation is at last on the cusp of crafting something like uniform national curriculum standards, the Texas State Board of Education is revising its social studies curriculum to tilt it in an extremist right wing direction, elevating Jefferson Davis to a stature equal to Abraham Lincoln, watering down the New Deal and the Great society and civil rights history, elevating the groundless claim of the centrality of Christianity in the founding of the republic, even mentioning the Tea Party movement as legitimate, to name just a few.
Why is this important? It is important because the sheer size of Texas makes it one of the prime purchasers of textbooks in the nation. Consequently, when Texas speaks, textbook publishers listen. This could lead to a decade of textbooks skewed to a malformed rightist view of our civil life and history.
It is time for publishers to stand firm and to act in a principled way to resist the textbook bullying of Texas.
The national standards being formulated may not be all that some of us would wish in the way of rigor and comprehensiveness and coherence, but they will be preferable to anything that the Texan right wingers can cook up.
Stop the Texification of our texts!
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