A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Textbook Controversy in Texas

The state of Texas has such a large public school system that much of the curriculum in the textbooks your state uses is decided upon by the Texas State Board of Education.  In order to make money, publishing companies have to mass produce and apparently it is too expensive to modify the books for each respective state.  But putting that point aside for a moment, the fact remains that the decisions made by this panel of 15 elected public servants in Texas have a tremendously important impact on American education.

From FoxNews.com:

What do liberal lawmakers in California share with their conservative counterparts in Texas? Very little. But this week both are watching the 15 member Texas State Board of Education, which will choose the next generation of history textbooks for most American children.

The left-right culture war will play out over the choice of words, photos, who to honor and what events in American and world history should receive a few lines of text. It may sound innocent, when it is anything but.

Years of research, months of editing, hundreds of hours of debate will be boiled down into a single document – a statement of curricula – that will define the parameters followed by virtually every social studies textbook and test for students from kindergarten to through 8th grade for the next decade.

The story continues:

On one side are conservatives, who contend academia has been hijacked by liberals. A point supported by studies that show 90 percent of humanities teachers identify themselves as Democrats.

And nowhere is their bias more visible than the one-sided treatment of American history in U.S. textbooks, where words like ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ have been stricken, ‘Founding Fathers’ has been replaced by ‘Framers’ and ‘Founders’ and racial quota’s are applied to the number of photos used in any one book.

Everyone in this country agrees that education is important.  There's no debate there.  The disagreement is over what type of education children will (and should) receive.   I don't believe that only conservatives should teach conservatives, and only liberals teach liberals.  But, elections have consequences, and these State Education Board members are entitled to make decisions in these matters, same as President Obama gets to nominate who he wants for the Supreme Court.

As the report mentioned, more than 90% of "Humanities" (i.e. History, Social Studies, etc.) teachers in the public school system are self-described Democrats.  In 2008, more than 80% of public school teachers and university professors voted for Barack Obama.  The numbers are almost identical going back decades.

To say that there is a slant toward the Left among our nation's educators and their administrators is like saying that the Cubs haven't won a World Series "in a few years now."

Liberals contend the board is out of touch and the block of social conservatives have manipulated the process to reflect teachings out of the mainstream.

“They have politicized the textbook process.  And I think that our schoolchildren deserve better than politicizing it,” Terri Burke, Texas ACLU Executive Director . “We really believe this curriculum should be turned over to experts who know something about history, about education, about the learning levels of schoolchildren. We ought to have people who really know it being the ones who write it and vet it and tell us that this is what kiddos oughta learn.”

Nice.  Liberals comprise no more than 20% of the nation's population.  Yet they comprise more than 80% of the academic world's population.  The Left has a distinctively different perspective on the history, economy, and political structure of the United States of America.  Conservatives, a block of at least 40% of the nation's population, want their kids to be given a more balanced view of this country and the world around them.

But when parents on the Right get involved in the decision making process they are told to shut up and sit down at School Board meetings.  When they ask for school vouchers or more school choice their voices are drowned out by the voices of teacher unions who have the ear of far too many politicians.  When they finally take their kids out, and either home-school them or place them in private (usually religious) schools, they are labeled nut-jobs and described in demeaning terms by the media.

So what are conservatives to do?

In California, a key state Senate Committee passed a bill Tuesday designed to prohibit any textbook approved in Texas to be used in the Golden State.

“While some Texas politicians may want to set their educational standards back 50 years, California should not be subject to their backward curriculum changes,” said Leland Yee, D-San Francisco.  “The alterations and fallacies made by these extremist conservatives are offensive to our communities and inaccurate of our nation’s diverse history.  Our kids should be provided an education based on facts and that embraces our multicultural nation.”

But we on the Right are the close-minded "haters" trying to impose our worldview and morals on the nation...