Texas’s elected state board of education, back in March, had the
audacity to instruct Texas book publishers as to the need for more
philosophically conservative standards in the social studies
curriculum. The Texas market is so large that textbook publishers
generally take what Texas dishes out and put it appreciatively to
their lips. The content of a textbook tailored for Texas can
influence the content of a textbook adopted in, good heavens,
Vermont or New Jersey. This makes the proceedings vital, not to say
controversial.
When did I know the board had done essentially the right thing?
The moment I picked up the Dallas Morning News and drank
in the musings of a columnist who was, well, let’s just say beside
herself.
First, this lady’s comparison of the board members to “your
crazy great-uncle who thinks Martians are spying on him through a
hole in the attic.” Then the weedwhacker buzz of indignation:
“embarrass us, humiliate us,” “underqualified ideologues,” “same
old blowhard talking points,” “indoctrination camp,” “idiotic
nitpicking.”
Then there was the columnist for the Austin
American-Statesman, loath to be outdone in the indignation
sweepstakes: “usual antics,” “slashing and burning,” “demonstration
of demagoguery, arrogance, ignorance.”
Ah, but the battlefield was a wide one, extending thousands of
miles eastward. Thomas Frank, in a Wall Street Journal
column, took primly disapproving notice. The New York
Times editorial page, in an offering headlined, “Rewriting
History in Texas,” saw evidence of a “disturbing intervention by
the board’s Republican majority into educational decisions best
left to the teachers and scholars who have toiled for almost a year
to produce the new curriculum standards.”
All this against the backdrop of the national campaign to pry
open America’s gullet for purposes of shoving down it the Obama
plan for takeover of the health care industry! Talk about
“arrogance.” A different kind, nonetheless, coming from a different
point on the ideological compass.
It was ever thus with “progressive” commentators on…oh,
practically anything you could think of. Pushback against instances
of liberal insight and understanding is barbaric, got that?
Conservative push-backers are typically yahoos if not
non-Harvard-educated morons and creationists. Especially from the
state that gave us George W. Bush.
No doubt the 10 Republican state board of education members who
pressed the revised standards over the opposition of five Democrats
sensed what was coming their way, once the discussion ended. They
did it their way anyway. Hooray! Them there fellers, as we Texas
yahoos conventionally say, separating the wisp of hay from the gap
in our front teeth…them folks done a right smart of good. “We are
adding balance,” explained the state board’s chairman, Dr. Don
McLeroy, who unfortunately lost his renomination battle this spring
to a soi-disant, non-embarrassing moderate. “…Academia is skewed
too far to the left.”
Is it ever! The U.S. educational establishment is so firmly in
the hands of, shall we say, the progressive element that it’s
astounding these folk could feel tetchy and put upon. Yet they do.
The problem they have is that, whereas their sort control the
classroom and the faculty lounge, conservative voters rear their
heads a couple of times a year, electing to the state school board
people who don’t believe, reflexively, that Earl Warren or Robert
Kennedy or even Barack Obama was God’s gift to the national
intellect. Or that homosexuality and heterosexuality equate to each
other. Or that we have to keep God off public premises lest He
contaminate the unpersuaded.
THE SBOE’S WORK COMES comes in for a hard time from liberals
because it goes against the liberal grain. Here and there the SBOE
may have pushed unduly hard. One headline-making story had to do
with the board’s rejection of a proposal to highlight the presence
of a relatively small number of Mexicans who stood alongside the
Texicans and Tennesseans at the Alamo. I myself wouldn’t have a
hard time with that concession, especially in light of the state’s
huge and growing Mexican/Hispanic presence. Still, this wasn’t, for
liberal commentators, the truly combustible matter. There was —
supposedly — worse.
For instance, the board’s vote to change the term “capitalism”
to “free enterprise system” in the teaching of economics. Guess
why. Because of the liberal propensity to disparage people who take
an idea or an opportunity and blow it up into a company, with
payrolls, benefit plans, yes, and profits. Liberals take corporate
guilt money for their foundations, but basically they don’t like
the idea of profit. They think, deep down, the government should
decide who gets what — as with health care. The term “free
enterprise” nicely and fittingly adorns our economic system. Why
not use it as a protective device against, among others, liberal
columnists?
Moreover, in the future, Texas demands textbook consideration of
the intellectual achievements of Milton Friedman and Friedrich
Hayek — a timely demand, indeed, what with the resurgence in the
Obama era of Keynesian-Krugmanite-redistributionist economics.
Naturally, liberal indignation soared stratospherically when the
board got around to matters religious. The board decided that
textbooks should make clear that strict separation of church and
state was not the Founders’ original design but rather a conceit of
Thomas Jefferson’s. Said one board member, David Bradley, with
admirable pugnacity as well as accuracy: “I reject the notion of
the left of a constitutional separation of church and state. I have
$1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the
Constitution.”
We all know what a successful attack on the separationist gospel
could entail — entry into the schoolroom of the controversial
notion that the Founding Fathers might have had some regard for
God, or the Supreme Being, or whatever. Which they did, in fact,
albeit in more nuanced degree than the heat of debate leads some on
the “religious right” to suggest or proclaim. If the Founding
Fathers weren’t Bible-thumpers-Diarmaid MacCulloch, the English
church historian, in a new book calls the religion of their day
“low temperature” — still they entertained respect for
Christianity, especially as a prop of public virtue and
morality.
Sorting it all out, as to meaning and intensity, can daunt in
the face of secular liberal assumptions that religion is better
understood as a divisive factor in public affairs (think evolution)
than as a foundation for understanding, and acting upon, the human
condition. The liberal assault on supernatural religion is perhaps
the preeminent feature of modern times. That the public schools,
where, in my own time, brief nondenominational prayer was an
unexceptional feature of particular school days, should acknowledge
the religious spirit is just too much for conscientious liberal
commentators to bear.
Other board-prescribed changes concern the perceived liberal
tilt in the teaching and explication of history. The board majority
wanted to ensure treatment of the late 20th-century conservative
movement that produced the Reagan revolution. So also members
wanted it made clear that Republicans supported civil rights
legislation in the '60s and that the Black Panthers preached and
practiced a gospel of violence. On “McCarthyism,” the board wanted
attention given the post-Cold War documentation (through the Venona
papers) of Soviet espionage in the United States. In other words,
contrary to received liberal gospel, Sen. Joe McCarthy wasn’t 100
percent off his rocker.
I SUPPOSE ONE MIGHT CALL this sort of thing micro-management of
information — the stuff that inspires liberal charges that the
state board of education is bent on nothing less than
“indoctrination” of innocent students. The truth is much larger and
more various. It has to do with the nature of post-1960s modern
society — its consensus-less nature, its domination in large
degree by strident relics of the counterculture who didn’t like
America in the '60s and haven’t developed much warmer feelings
about it since then.
The public schools I myself attended in the 1950s reflected a
general sort of agreement as to what was good — e.g., America, the
American tradition, the West, hard work, freedom…and God. Not God
last of all; rather, as sort of a unitive element in our national
deliberations and activities. We didn’t argue as much in those days
as we argue now. I can tell you because I was there. It was nice.
You needed no state boards of education to keep things nice. You
certainly do now.
Americans, as anybody with one eye can see, no longer agree on
the purposes of nation-hood, far less those of public education. We
battle incessantly over those purposes, as the schools grow worse
and worse: to the point some wonder, who cares, all the smart
people are going to decamp anyway. Ironically, as the public
schools extrude more and more of the best and brightest, liberals
grow more and more jealous of their present ascendancy over the
schools, less and less trustful of calls to strengthen curriculum
and performance.
We’re not having down here in the Lone Star State and elsewhere
an argument about church-state separation so much as we’re going
through a family feud over the meaning of the new America —
including the vital question, does it need and should it have a new
meaning?
My fellow morons and yahoos in Texas, to extrapolate from
returns in most, not all, state school board elections, find the
old values, the old principles still worthy of respect and
observance. Not so the liberals among us, who claim offense at the
idea that public schools should operate in any sense along the
lines of 50 years ago. Maybe they’re right. Even then the schools
were far from ideal. Do we improve them, all the same, by belching
fire and vengeance when conservatives say, wait, hold on, let’s
have a little balance in how we present the story of all our
lives?
Testy, testy, these liberals who appear to hope all
conservatives would just quit the public schools entirely if they
don’t like what goes on there. Maybe some day they’ll get their
wish.
