The Texas Textbook Massacre

The Texas State Board of Education, if you haven't heard it in the news already, is the largest buyer of textbooks in the country. Textbooks that are bought by the Texas SBOE are usually used throughout the country in other state curricula.

That's the skinny. But here is why you should be afraid. Be very afraid. (emphasis added)

In recent years, board members have been locked in an ideological battle between a bloc of conservatives who question Darwin’s theory of evolution and believe the Founding Fathers were guided by Christian principles, and a handful of Democrats and moderate Republicans who have fought to preserve the teaching of Darwinism and the separation of church and state.

Since January, Republicans on the board have passed more than 100 amendments to the 120-page curriculum standards affecting history, sociology and economics courses from elementary to high school. The standards were proposed by a panel of teachers.

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

If you click on that link there going to Don McLeroy's profile, you'll see that the man is a dentist and a fourth-grade Sunday School teacher. Oh yeah. This is the kind of guy that is heading up this school board.

Don McLeroy is a self-described fundamentalist Christian. This, alone, makes him completely unqualified to hold the position he is in. Fundamentalist Christianity is the very antithesis of everything involving education, science, and quite frankly any sort of reason. He is not alone, either.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Ay, there's the rub. These board members want to create a "balance" in history textbooks. Where have I heard this before?

Oh yeah. The whole "teach the controversy" nonsense that the Discovery Institute attempted to pull in 2005 before Dover v. Kitzmiller.

Listen, you buffoons on the board. Attempting to rewrite history to obtain some sort of "balance" is not only completely insane, it's dishonest and downright foolish. I go into more detail in episode 57 of Freethought Rhode Island, so have a listen to the show if any of you are interested. (We had a Baptist pastor call in... it makes for some very interesting conversation between me and this man, involving a purple fire-breathing dragon in my garage!)

What frightens me is that this attempted rewrite of history will likely be distributed to schools across the nation. Something needs to be done about the Texas Board of Education and fast. I do not want my son going to school without learning about Thomas Jefferson, the man who penned the Declaration of Independence and who practically invented the separation of church and state.

...a concept, apparently, that conservatives don't even realize protects them.