Teaching American history, Texas Style: the Confederate persepective

Anyone with a few hours to kill can read the actual curriculum—showing all the revisions, deletions, and additions with color coding, here.

This curriculum will seem perfectly “fair and balanced” if you believe the following things:

1. The Republican Party is, was, and always will be, almost entirely right about everything.

2. The Democratic Party is a fringe party whose ideas, history, and leaders aren’t generally relevant to a high school social studies curriculum, except as negative examples.

3. Joe McCarthy was right—government was infested with Commie spies, and McCarthy’s an American Hero.

4. Ronald Reagan single-handedly ended the Cold War and defeated the Soviet Union.

5. This is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, using Christian governing documents
(never mind that the Constitution never mentions God or any religion except to forbid establishing one, or that many of the most important Founding Fathers weren’t Christians, or that the Pledge of Allegiance didn’t mention “under God” until it was added during the McCarthy Witch Hunt Era).

6. America is the greatest nation on Earth, Americans are the greatest people on Earth, and we should generally avoid teaching students anything that might deviate from this mantra; that is, they are to be indoctrinated more than to be taught actual critical thinking.

7. Scientific discoveries are made to meet actual needs—there’s no such thing as pure research (I wouldn’t have believed this if I hadn’t read it).

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I realize that leftists have done their darndest to make high school social studies curricula the exact opposite of all this—aiming, just like these Texas Republicans, to indoctrinate rather than to actually teach critical thinking skills and a warts-and-all exploration of American culture and history.

For example, I oppose illegal immigration—including amnesty--along with around half of registered Democrats. But this is a topic with a substantial minority who favor amnesty. Social studies curricula should discuss the issue taking all of this into account, not turn it into pablum, or simply ignore the other side.

My conclusion, after reading the actual source document, and adding that I have a degree in sociology and am a political centrist: this new Texas curriculum is a giant leap backwards. No competent, politically non-ideological social scientist would endorse it.

Some critics of the Texas school board's right wing majority have accused them of substituting indoctrination for education, as I did above myself. But I should make clear that I don't think they think this.

You see, their model of education is Sunday School.

In Sunday School, what happens is education, but it's the worshipful study of the subject matter. The goal is what a nonreligious person would call indoctrination, and that's true, but for the faithful it's simply the transmission of the great truths of existence from one generation to the next.

The Texas Republicans who did this to Texas see analytic education from that worshipful perspective--i.e., there is only indoctrination. So if it's not indoctrination in what you might call Americanism, it's indoctrination in Com-yew-nism or some such.

So for them the Democrats on the board and those of us who criticize them are simply enemy indoctrinators who lost this fight.

And if you look at the innumerable comments on this thread supporting the Texas Republican Indoctrinators, you'll see that this is their model too.

That's probably part and parcel of some of them posting the same comments over and over. Just in case we didn't get it the first time and the second and the third etc.