Texas’ textbook zealots simply will not go away
They’re baaaack. Like gulls with the shrimp boat. Like a dog with an old boot that smells of lost love. Like front-porch solicitors of your eternal soul. They’re baaaack. We speak of the righteous right-wingers who control the State Board of Education.
One of the truly frightening things about the state of Texas is the influence a small group of religious zealots have over the textbooks. The Right-wing zealots who control the state’s Board of Education seem determined to turn every public school class into the equivalent of a daily Sunday School class. Teaching critical thinking by exposing our children to differing viewpoints? Not if these nutjobs have their way.
These folks are less interested in educating children than propagandizing them. The idea seems to be to turn them into perfect little Christian soldiers, whose world view holds America to be infallible. Ideally, they believe that our children will graduate from high school convinced that the Bible is the infallible word of God, that feminism and evolution are the instruments of Satan, and that questioning these convictions makes one the enemy of the American way of life. REAL Americans don’t think; they believe. Now THAT’S education….
This sort of narrow-minded Know-Nothing approach to public education has thankfully been brought under control since the mid-90s, but you didn’t think these zealots would take a reduction of their power and influence lying down, did you?
The board convenes regularly. Generally, it does no harm.
One reason it does less harm than before is that several years ago the Legislature took away one of the board’s favorite privileges ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ the power of the board majority to edit our children’s textbooks to meet its narrowly confined political and world views.
The Board of Education wants that baaaack. Last week, board member Terri Leo sought a ruling from Attorney General Greg Abbott. She hopes the Republican will reverse former AG Dan Morales’ opinion in 1996 that Texas law limited the board’s discretion in textbook selection to matters of fact.
Under Morales’ ruling, the board’s only authority is to ensure that textbooks are factual and sufficiently aligned with the state’s essential academic elements.
When the law was passed in 1995, it was a big comedown for those righteous few who came to sit on the state school board hoping to score a blow against varied threats to our moral fabric. Those include feminism, evolution and the teaching of actual American history ‚Äö√Ñ√Æ that kind that acknowledges America and the free enterprise system didn’t get everything right every step of the way.
So much for teaching our children to examine the world around them and think critically, eh? Apparently, our children’s lock-step ideological obedience is more important than the ability to critically examine our world and thinking for themselves.
Left to their own devices, the zelaots would have our children immersed in a narrow, intolerant, Bible-based, America-centric worldview. Your tax dollars at work, eh?
In the 1990s, in some cases employing specious claims about schools promoting homosexuality or distributing condoms, social conservatives won a slate of targeted races and assumed control over the state school board.
Surely an inspiration to many of them was the matinee intrigue of the late ’70s and ’80s when Longview textbook monitors Mel and Norma Gabler would come to Austin. Appearing as concerned citizens troubled by what they saw in proposed textbooks, the Gablers quoted chapter and verse about what was godless and un-American about learning materials up for approval by the state.
The Gablers came to have amazing sway and developed a cottage industry of sorts, so much so that they came to be seen as de facto gatekeepers for the nation as a whole. Since Texas is the second biggest bulk customer for textbooks, what the Gablers could cow the state school board to edit out would influence what most of America’s children read in the classroom.
And they were specific. In social studies books they didn’t like pictures of women in office suits, briefcases in hand. That was counter to traditional gender roles. And discussions of racial oppression on these shores were just so much anti-Americanism.
Fortunately, things started to change, such as a change in the law on the hearings that allowed people to support textbook passages in response. But the biggest development was the law written in ‘95, which today’s board wants the attorney general to abrogate.
New-generation watchdog groups like the Texas Freedom Network, you might call them the anti-Gablers, assert that members of the school board at times have circumvented the law by going directly to textbook publishers about a particular passage that didn’t meet their imperatives.
You can’t blame those on the board for champing at the bit. They ran for state school board expecting to save mankind, with Texas as their vessel, from all influences causing Earth’s downfall.
And those damn fools in the Legislature took away their power to edumicate our children as if they were growing up in a theocracy…which, in a perfect world, would be EXACTLY what the zealots would be using tax dollars to accomplish.
Given the far-Right ideology of the Texas Republican party, it should come as no surprise that this battle is continuing, and promises to continue until the zealots have their way. Of course, things could be worse- we could be in Kansas. At least Intelligent Design has become an issue in Texas- yet.
The truly sad thing about this struggle is that it’s about education. It should be about preparing our children to live and succeed in the world they will face once they reach the age of majority. We should be teaching them to think for themselves, to consider all sides of issues before making up their own minds. Critical thinking is NOT something to fear. Children not equipped to succeed in the 21st century is. If we send our children to Texas public schools, only to get back Evangelical Bush Republicans steeped in Amerika uber Alles, how can we expect them to thrive in the global economy that is the hallmark of the 21st century?
This fight is not over. The zealots who want to save Texas children from Godless humanism and secular ideology are patient and persistent. Good and decent people need to keep in mind what the mid-90s was like. The Texas Legislature may have finally done the right thing by curbing the power of the Board of Education to influence the content of textbooks, but it’s not as if the zealots will give up easily. No, when your goal is to make Texas safe for good White Christians, the fight continues….
