TEXAS TEXTBOOKS UNDER MINDLESS ATTACK

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Five years ago, after months of biased reporting, millions of Americans learned — incorrectly — that Christian extremists on the Texas state school board had engineered a top-to-bottom overhaul of history standards that was destined to corrupt textbooks nationwide. “Texas Textbook Massacre: Ultraconservatives Approve Radical Changes to State Education Curriculum,” said a Huffington Post headline at the time.

 

This line of thought now seems cast in progressive stone, intensified by conflict over the Confederate flag, now perceived by many to be an emblem of hate. Thanks to a front-page article in the Washington Post on July 5, ”A Classroom Battle over Interpreting the Civil War,” and a wave of news reports since, including Diane Rehm’s on NPR, Americans are hearing that textbook publishers have surrendered to reactionary forces, soft-pedaling slavery as a cause of the Civil War and subsequent racism in the South.

 

According to the narrative, when school begins in the fall, U.S. history textbooks based on 2010 social studies standards are ready for delivery to about 5 million Texas students. These textbooks not only distort the reasons for the Civil War. By portraying slavery merely as one of several factors pushing Southern states to secede, and by focusing on states’ rights, dishonest Texas textbooks cater to residual racialism. Making matters worse, the Texas standards do not explicitly require textbooks to include material on Jim Crow laws that perpetuated segregation or on the Ku Klux Klan.