Had it not been for a girl I might be living somewhere today on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I might also be much prouder of the state I was living in than the one in which I reside today.
Tough words for a Texan to say. For most of my life Mississippi has appeared as a perpetual bottom dweller when it comes to lists concerning education or wealth or this and that. Texas has also made the lower parts of the same lists in more recent times though I have managed to stay proud of the Lone Star State itself, its people and its history.
But it is history — at least United States history which will be taught to future public school students — that makes me hang my head in shame.
You see, we have this bloc of ultra-conservative, fundamentalist religious zealots on our State Board of (Un)Education that is steering all courses in the directions of their beliefs and their beliefs alone. Right now the focus is history. Perhaps tomorrow they will slant all mathematics to the right.
These zealots tried but failed to strike the name of Scopes Monkey Trial attorney Clarence Darrow. They were successful in having language that tries to vindicate that old reprobate Sen. Joe McCarthy. In the new right-wing history in Texas, conservative icons Newt Gingrich and Phyllis Schafly are the important names to remember on history tests on the sections covering the late 20th century.
It is worse than I can describe. High school students who learn the history according to the right-wing nuts on the SBOE or SBOU, will be at a disadvantage when they attend college and learn what the rest of U.S. students have been taught about their past. Those who don’t go on to college will just be cheated out of a decent education because Texas voters were either duped or thought they could legislate the 1950s back into schools which are perceived to be rife with trouble.
Don’t get me wrong. I still love the pine forests of East Texas and the marshes of the upper Texas coast. Likewise, I enjoy driving the Hill Country of Central Texas whenever the highly allergenic ashe juniper (mountain cedar) isn’t pollinating. There is also beauty in the West Texas mountains and North Texas prairies.
There also is no other state, in my mind, with such a fascinating history as that of Texas with its past as a republic and its colonial past which includes Spain and Mexico.
But our elected board running the public schools in Texas is robbing kids of a decent education due to their narrow-minded political and theocratic agenda. We should teach students about the conservative movement and how it has affected politics and the economy just as we should teach the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Likewise, influential conservatives in history including Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan and as much as it pains me to say it, Rush Limbaugh, deserve their place in history texts along with FDR, JFK, Teddy Kennedy, Clinton and Barack Obama.
History can live and thrive under a big tent. And making children educationally backwards serves no great purpose either in improving society, nor toward molding it into one’s shape politically unless you aim for a totalitarian society. So how about it? Let’s get these nuts off the Texas board of education. Let’s teach history, the good and the bad. The kids can handle it and they will be better citizens for it.
Oh, as for the girl whom I moved back to Texas for from Mississippi after the service? Well, that didn’t work out, but that’s all ancient history.
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