Turning 'Texas Education' Into an Oxymoron

In the good-and-good-for-you department, food scientists are now
touting the health benefits of
enjoying a handful of nuts every day.

I, for one, am glad, because I love nuts - pecans, hazelnuts,
pistachios, almonds, you-name-'em. But my favorite nuts, by far, are the
homegrown natives that have taken root in one particularly fertile area
of my state: the Texas Board of Education.
You just can't get any nuttier than this bunch!

This board, little-known even to us Texans, has lately risen to
national notoriety, making our state's educational system a punch line
for comedians everywhere. That's because a handful of ultra-right-wing
nutcases have taken over this elected overseer of Texas educational
policy, and they're hell-bent to supplant classroom education with their
own brand of ideological indoctrination.

Their way of achieving this political goal is to rewrite the state
standards that textbook publishers must follow to get the lucrative
contracts for providing teaching materials for every student in the
state, from first grade through high school.

Their latest exercise in ideological correctness comes at the expense
of the social studies curriculum. They spent last week going through
guidelines for history, government,
economics and sociology textbooks, purging references that offend their
doctrinaire sensibilities and substituting their own nutty biases and
ignorance.

How nutty? Take Thomas Jefferson. They did! They literally did take
Jefferson off a list of revolutionary political thinkers from the
Enlightenment period, replacing him with a favorite of Christian
fundamentalists, John Calvin. Thus, the prime author of our Declaration
of Independence - poof - disappeared! Jefferson's unpardonable
transgression? He coined the term "separation between church and state."

Any concepts that might spur progressive thoughts in young minds were
also expunged. "Justice," for example, was stripped from a list of
virtues meant to teach grade-schoolers the characteristics of good
citizenship. No doubt the board majority would love to get its hands on the Pledge of Allegiance'sassertion of "justice for all," but luckily, the pledge doesn't come
under the members' purview.

Yet.

The nuts were able to strike "responsibility for the common good"
from the citizenship characteristics list, however, and they just missed
deleting the American ideal of "equality." They also narrowly lost on a
vote to impose a new requirement that students be taught that the civil
rights movement created "unreasonable expectations," but they did
manage to balance the positive impact of Martin Luther King Jr. with an
insistence that the "positives" of Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt for commies
and of Jefferson Davis' secessionist government also be taught.

Likewise, the full-tilt rightists expelled Delores Huerta, the
much-admired farm worker leader, from a list of "good citizenship"
models, airily dismissing this courageous champion of justice as a
socialist. On the other hand, they mandated that Phyllis Schlafly, the
Heritage Foundation and Newt Gingrich's Contract With America be taught
as historic icons of a "conservative resurgence" in America.

One especially delicious moment came when the board considered a
listing of world leaders who fought political repression. On the list
was Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who led an indigenous poor
people's movement in the 1980s before the country's right-wing death
squads assassinated him as he was celebrating mass.

The board cut Romero from the list, declaring that he lacked the
stature of such other repression fighters as Gandhi. After all, one
board member explained, unlike Gandhi, Romero had not had a movie made
about his life, so how important could he've been? But - oops! - there
was a popular 1989 feature film called "Romero" about the archbishop's
exemplary life. The board was embarrassed, but it axed him anyway.

Words were banned, too. The phrase "democratic societies," for
example was replaced by the cumbersome "societies with representative
government." And even the term "capitalism" was censored for having a
negative connotation. Instead, the board decreed that "free enterprise"
be used throughout all social studies courses. In addition, all
references to the Age of Enlightenment were dropped, because ... well,
because these full-fledged political purists don't want any concept
based on reason getting into the heads of our school kids.

Texas education wasn't that great before all this folderal, but these
doctrinaire morons are turning "Texas education" into an oxymoron.