Texas board adopts new social studies curriculum (AP via Yahoo! News)

I didn’t blog about this controversy when it first erupted a couple of months ago because I was trying to sort through some other stuff, but I did mention it to my students at the time, and we talked a bit about it.  Like me, the inclusion of Confederate generals and statesmen as “examples of good leaders” seemed to hit my students the hardest, if only because the Confederacy lost.  I still wonder if young students in the south are taught that, or if they’re still learning of what some down there euphemistically call the “War Between the States” or the “War of Northern Aggression.”  Earlier this year I pulled behind a car with a South Carolina license plate; on its rear was a bumper sticker with a Confederate flag, next to which was printed the words, “Fighting Terrorists Since 1861.”  Besides which, if Texas wants examples of southern leaders who showed great courage and fortitude even in defeat, they have all the leaders of Battle of the Alamo to choose from, which isn’t tainted with the stench of the Confederacy and slavery.

Perhaps the most surprising thing for me in this whole story was that this same board, at the same time it was calling for open glorification of Confederate figureheads, it called for the removal of all references to Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy.  This surprised me because even though I went to a private, secular school, Nader’s name wasn’t mentioned to me once, even though I took AP US History.  Most people my age, and even older, don’t know that much about Nader apart from his recent presidential campaigns, and given the importance of Nader in our recent history — if only for how many governmental agencies were created thanks to his campaigning — I think Nader needs to be taught in US history.  This isn’t to say that Nader should be lauded, as much as I may do so; rather, his influence on the shape of our government should be taught, and students should be allowed to decide for themselves whether or not he is ultimately a beneficial or detrimental figure in our history.

This is hardly the first time a controversy has erupted over textbook content, but this is one of the most galling examples I can think of from my own lifetime.  As both a student and a teacher, I have wide experience seeing how the things people are taught in their early years stick with them, especially as our educational system has moved more and more towards rote memorization, where students are expected to simply memorize facts and dates and formulas, and away from learning how to think for themselves.  I can’t tell you how many students I’ve had who have said that my classes were the first they’ve had that actually taught them how to think for themselves, and I teach in a region that, despite its social conservatism in some areas, is still a relatively liberal part of the country.  Who knows how bad it gets in some of these states where students are taught, more or less, that the answer to any question whether historical, mathematical, or scientific, is “God did it.”

As has been mentioned many times in this controversy, these Texas textbooks, because of Texas’ size and the number of students they serve, will end up going around all over the nation.  Making this worse is the fact that, in addition to setting curricula, politicians with no experience of teaching, no theoretical knowledge of how minds learn, are also restricting teachers in the ways they can adopt textbooks and lesson plans to best serve their own students, even if the politicians in question have never even come close to the teacher’s city, know nothing about the people of that region and the specific educational needs their young people have.  Behind all the rhetoric of “not leaving children behind” and charter schools and “intelligent design” and all of that is an epidemic of teachers being turned into little more than talking heads, unable to do anything but read out a proscribed lesson plan.  It’s a wonder they don’t just install webcams in the classrooms and outsource teaching jobs to some country where they can pay the “teachers” less than minimum wage.

As left-wing as I may be, I am firmly dedicated to the idea of teaching students to see all sides of an issue and make their own informed judgments.  Earlier this year, when members of the Hutaree militia in the county I teach in were arrested for plotting to kill a police officer, ambush the officer’s funeral, and ultimately overthrow the government, I argued forthe militia’s rights in class because no student would, just to try to help them see things from the militia’s point of view, even though I find that point of view nauseatingly abhorrent.  With these new guidelines in place, though, a generation of students, in Texas and elsewhere, will be taught that Jefferson Davis is someone to be emulated, and won’t learn about figures like Ralph Nader and Thomas Jefferson because their beliefs don’t conform with those of a few ultra-right-wingers in Texas who want to keep future generations of Americans as uninformed as they are.  Between this and the Rand Paul debacle, it probably won’t be long before we start seeing Republicans propose legislation to stop fluoridating water.