I saw this news last week…:
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
…and thought “oh, great”.
Not that I don’t think some balance is in order. After having kids and stepkids in one school or another for the past twenty years, there’s no question that the public education system is biased to the left, especially in whatever pass for “humanities” in the public schools. History education in particular is a joke; I’ve spoken, exasperated, about this in the past; my kids have gone years where all they studies were slavery and civil rights. Important, sure. Episodes with big impact on many of the kids’ lives? Absolutely. The only things, practically, worth studying? Hardly.
And on the occasions where other parts of history and current events were studied? Yeah, pretty much “America last”; the few kids who are even exposed to the ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” seem, for some reason completely unknown to me – to come out of school with the idea that “conservatism is about the right to own slaves and the freedom to let old people freeze”. Nothing new there.
So the idea of “balance” seems, on the surface, to be an improvement.
The problem is, I don’t want either side – any side, really – writing the history books “favorably” to themselves. I’m not one of those people who ever thought teaching kids the dates and places and events was such a bad thing; tell kids what happened, and show them what other commentators – not textbook writers – have written about the events, and let them make up their own minds.
“But Mitch! Kids are stupid! They don’t have what it takes to process all that information!” So do you think they’re processing the pre-digested stuff that’s slanted one way or the other? Hell, most history teachers haven’t processed most of what history actually means.
The big question with this Texas fracas is “how good an idea is it for committees of politicians, most of them pretty ignorant themselves, to be determining what goes into textbooks and curricula?”
Cross-posted and comments welcome at Shot In The Dark.
