Texas Textbook Controversy: David Loftus

Enough’s enough. I try to be fair and open-minded, and give the opposition the benefit of the doubt in my commentaries; but the Texas Board of Education has tried to go too far. With the same sort of Alice-in-Wonderland reverse logic that has characterized conservative opposition to health care reform, the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, and dissent in time of war, the Christian zealots who have swamped the Texas Board try to argue they are “bringing balance” back into social studies and history curricula that have been overrun by liberal values and multiculturalism ever since the 1960s. (Make that the 1950s, because that’s the last time they seem to think American history and values made sense.)

These activists know in their hearts that they’re not being fair or objective. They know they’re fighting a cultural war and they’re trying desperately to weight the dice unfairly in the direction of their personal beliefs. “To me, it’s just providing accurate history and my observation is that the left doesn’t even know they have biased it,” says Don McLeroy, a dentist and member of the conservative bloc on the Texas Board who openly describes himself as an orthodox, fundamentalist Christian. Now, anyone who knows anything about history has to admit that it’s never about being totally fair and objective; someone’s always advancing an agenda, whether consciously or not, and someone’s ox is going to get unfairly gored. Still, there are standards of fairness and factuality, and if anything, the writing of history involves gradual, ongoing corrections to the assumptions of the winners: the ruling party, the folks whose descendants have incorrectly been feeling (spurred on by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck) that they have been persecuted, discriminated against, and diminished by history. What they’re trying to do is become the winners in history again when historians have been laboring to correct the misconceptions of the winning classes.

I can’t see that anything they want to put into textbooks is an outright lie or inaccuracy. But it does give undue weight to their pet organizations and theories, in a way that is no more self-questioning or rigorously analytical than the imperialist dogmas of a century ago. And that’s not right. There’s a part of me that would love to just let Texas school districts have at it, because the results will be continued ignorance and insularity for those who continue to live in that state, and a rude awakening for native Texans who try to advance in their careers and social lives when they leave it. But this power play by a vocal handful on the Texas Board of Education has a potentially greater reach than across the landscape of their own state; so many textbooks are purchased in Texas that national publishers tailor their products to that market, which in turn affects the rest of the country. (Not even California school districts purchase their textbooks in a bloc anymore, the way Texas does.) And that is simply unacceptable.