Texas Textbooks Under Mindless Attack

[Draggingtree]

Texas Textbooks Under Mindless Attack

Liberal critics, picking up on the Confederate flag hysteria, again read what isn’t there.

By Gilbert T. Sewall – 7.16.15

 

Wikimedia Commons image: http://cdn.spectator.org/styles/article_page/s3/Schlacht_von_Glorieta_Pass-1.JPG?itok=g8XJ9tHm

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.