The Texas Textbook Two-Step, by Arianna Schioldager

The good folks in Texas drink a lot of beer. They eat a lot of biscuits and gravy and cover their morning buns with margarine. They watch a lot of football. They blabber asinine political statements, garble inane slander and slurred halleluiahs, and for the most part, they aren’t really good for much of anything, save for birthing inept Presidents and selfish oilmen.

The above are my opinions. They are not facts, and they do not, however posed, pretend to be facts. They aren’t aligned with any sect, religion, or denomination, and most importantly they are not historically (or are they?) based, nor would I attempt to teach these sentiments to children as history.

Key word in all of the above: my.

I’d even be willing to entertain the idea that pigeonholing an entire state for the sins/stupidity of its bad seeds is narrow-minded, especially considering, again, that at the heart of my matter with Texas is a subjective opinion.

Sadly, the harbingers of the holy righteous right, i.e. the members of the Texas Education Board, don’t seem to grasp the concept of opinion versus fact, and the mud they are slinging at the minds of impressionable children is filthy enough to make Global Warming blush.

In short, the Board is attempting – and succeeding- to rewrite history: to “revise” the Social Studies curriculum of their some 4.7 million students.  As they so also have it, Texas’ monstrous size and subsequent large market for textbooks happens to determine content for a large number of the textbooks used nationwide.  Bigger is better, or so they say over there.

For decades now, conservatives have been trying to rope curriculum under the thumbs with which they finger their bibles for decades. The pursuit of a narrowly traditionalist fundamental religion-based education is not a new battle, but this time, they are actually making headway. They are taking their bad seeds and attempting to plant them in the wide-eyed minds of our youth, through not so subliminal textbook warfare.

Cynthia Dunbar, a Texas lawyer, one of the conservatives who wiggled control of the Texas Educational Board, claims that “there seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We needed to go back and make some corrections.”

I’m sorry. Some corrections? I didn’t realize that a law degree also made you a historian, or better yet a writer of fiction, casting history under the burden of antiquated dogma.

Here are a few (of the most alarming) particulars on their revisionist chopping block:

1. Separation of church and state.   Dunbar calls this a “myth, saying there is no constitutional evidence for such separation.
2. Thomas Jefferson, who gets sidelined by debunking number 1.
3. Slavery.  The Atlantic Slave Trade will be referred to as the Atlantic Triangle Trade, because you know, they really like shapes in Texas.
4. Gun control.  The NRA gets at least a page for good deeds.
5. Japanese internment.  The one that took place during WWII.  We dragged entire families out of their homes, took their possessions, and then forced them into internment camps.  Yep, not racist.
6. Music.  Country music- important. Hip hop- not so much.

They claim they are looking for balance, but a whiteout of historically significant facts is hardly balanced: it is fascist.

In 1988, Joan Didion took a swing at the political processes of The New York Review of Books. What she discovered was not a “mechanism that offered the nation’s citizens a voice in its affairs” but instead, a system, “designed by – and for- ‘that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.’” This is precisely what they are doing with the Texas textbook two-step: invent.  Invent for the purposes of personal and subjective religious opinions.

Didion’s not so new notion suggests that history has always been skewed in favor of its victors.  To the victors go the spoils.  Accordingly, our history is weighted in favor of those with the heavier side of the scale.  Checks and balances my ass: mighty is the hand that holds the dollar. However, in the textbook debate, the evangelical Texan right have decided, in honor of their religious opinions, mighty is the hand that wields the biggest cross.

Textbooks as they currently read are not wholly unbiased.  American beginnings are clouded with half-truths.  Columbus is portrayed as the hero.  The devastating aftermath of colonialism and the travails of Lewis and Clark are distorted at best.  We incorporated the fundamental elements of English law into our policy, while revolting against their tyranny.  Our history is violent and our scales are ubiquitously tipped: fabrication weighs far more than truth.

Whether in book reviews or textbooks, we have trouble with an even distribution of fact.  But our scales are not yet broken. Texas intends to break them.

My biggest issue is, not that Texas is predominantly conservative, or that they would propose such arrogant and racist sentiments.  This much is not new, but the kicker is that the victims in this situation are our children, who, without a say in the matter or the right to vote are already on the losing side of history.

When you take away the right to learn the unbiased facts and pump history and science full of religious morals and fundamentals, you destroy the ability of future generations to form their own opinions.  The Texas Education Board is drumming so loudly, it will be difficult for the children to hear anything else.

Was this country founded in a cloud of religious zealotry?  Absolutely.  But does that mean that a sectarian, narrowly defined Lord is at the heart of law, government, and individual rights? No. Does that give religion the right to persecute not only history, but the future as well? Hardly. This isn’t a game of finders-keepers.

The textbook war isn’t just a massacre- it’s inb-read-ing, a guarantee for the future.  It is political agenda at its ugliest, because by the time these Gen-TEX right-winged and margarine-fueled breed are old enough to vote, our country will be a mass of history rising, swung so far to the right, we will have broken the pendulum.  Little right-wing robots will be like mushrooms popping up in the rain.  But the problem is those mushrooms are poisonous. You don’t eat them. You warn your children not to eat them.

If all goes well for Texas, in 50 years we will have interned all gays, women will no longer have the right to vote, bathrooms will be separate but equal, because, as the Texas Board so accurately pointed out with the whole Japanese WWII debacle, it isn’t racist or brutish or piggish if you quarantine people across the board.

This may sound an absurd extreme, but so is what the Board and its supporters are actually doing in Texas.

Is it possible that Thomas Jefferson may one day vanish from our collective memory, surfacing only as an article of innocuous nostalgia? What’s next? The burning of books and heretics at the stake? Why is this ok to even propose to teach to our children?

This isn’t Washington.  Citizens don’t get to filibuster their own personal agendas into textbooks.  The curriculum of our country should be a right that is based in fact, not in the bible or its whipping belt.

Texas textbook supporters claim it is all in honor of the “free enterprise system” (their term for democracy), but if we want to teach democracy, we must in turn live democracy.  Remember that certain little clause- I think the one that Thomas Jefferson (yes the same Thomas Jefferson Dunbar wishes to remove from the curriculum) coined about separation of church and state? It isn’t a myth, or a blunder in history, but rather an integral and pivotal aspect of our nation’s commonwealth.

Maybe they would learn something from history if they weren’t adamantly trying to correct it.

We absolutely need a revamping of our educational system.  We teach with a very linear, single-sided mentality- hence the arts education debate.  So let’s re-write the curriculum, re-vamp the structure, tear it all down and build it up anew.  But we can’t let the idiots running their mouths amuck on the top of Tower of Babel they’ve erected in Texas have their way, because if they do win, in this particular episode of our country’s history there are no victors.  And in turn no spoils.