The Texas Schoolbook Victory

While most of American conservatism is consumed over the life-or-death struggle against Obamacare this week, it's worth taking note of a major victory elsewhere which might, in the long run, prove to be even more important.  The Dallas Morning News tartly summed it up:

A divided State Board of Education decided Friday that history students must remember the Alamo but not the names of Hispanics who fought for Texas' independence.

This was the tip of a much larger iceberg.  The Texas Board of Education has been considering the contents of their state's history textbooks, as they do every decade.  As (presumably) students of history themselves, the board members are well aware of George Orwell's warning:

Who controls the past controls the future.

It's not news that the American educational establishment is predominantly liberal.  Various scholarly studies have demonstrated that, for instance, Ronald Reagan rarely gets proper credit for winning the Cold War, and other textbooks have spent more time discussing Rosa Parks than "Father of the Constitution" James Madison.  We can't help but observe that the Dallas Morning News themselves didn't consider the "names of Hispanics who fought for Texas' independence" to be of sufficient importance as to merit inclusion in their article, but felt schoolchildren's history study time should be spent on them.

The battle has gotten so ridiculous as to force the Texas board to vote down a suggested inclusion of misogynistic, violent hip-hop in the history curriculum "as an example of an important cultural movement."

Why does this matter?  Well, in the immediate term, Texas makes the largest schoolbook purchases of any state so whatever they buy will probably be the cheapest and most widely-available textbooks nationwide.  In that sense, the decisions of the Texas Board of Ed will strongly influence what children learn all across the country: the unknowns who sit on this board may have a greater influence for good or ill than do many famous politicians.

It's long been known that young people tend to be more liberal than their parents.  In part, it's a result of their lack of real-world experience; many aged liberals have spent their entire lives insulated from the real world by cushy posts in government or universities.

But it's also because of the relentless shoving of liberal themes into impressionable young minds.  Will the eventual political views of children differ if they are taught about George Washington, Thomas Edison, and Ronald Reagan, as opposed to Cesar Chavez, Harvey Milk, and Malcolm X?  Of course they will.

For over one hundred years, far-seeing liberals have known the truth of Orwell's quote: by controlling the past, and controlling how our youth are educated about it, they can control the future.  In the early 1900s, John Dewey became the Father of Modern American Education; it's no accident that he's also known as the Father of Progressive Education.

This quote from Dewey's highly influential book The School and Society explains modern liberalism in a nutshell:

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. [emphasis added]

Sounds fair enough, doesn't it?  The trouble is that it's a recipe for top-down totalitarianism.

Dewey felt that "the best and wisest" should choose the curriculum for everybody - and who is "the best and wisest" but ruling liberals like Dewey and his associates?  After all, they've been to Harvard!  They know better than you!

By the nature of children, somebody does know better than they.  The whole point of being a parent, teacher, or other authority figure is that you have wisdom that the kids don't have, and your job is to impart it to them whether they like it or not.  Exactly what that "wisdom" consists of will have a massive influence on the later lives of those children.

A teacher who instills the Great Men and Great Deeds of history into his young charges may inspire them to greatness in their own lives.  A teacher who honors Thomas Edison may inspire the next world-changing inventor; a teacher who reveres George Washington or Dwight Eisenhower may influence a future American general.

Whom do the Democrats on Texas' Board of Ed want our youth to follow?  Violent racists like Malcolm X, union militants like Cesar Chavez, and footnotes to history whose only claim to historical fame is being in the right place at the right time as members of a preferred race or gender.

Since the days of John Dewey, one step at a time, the leftists and progressives of each succeeding generation have managed to instill their philosophy into our teachers' colleges, universities, professorships, and individual schools right down to your local elementary and kindergarten.  For the most part, this has been unopposed or subject only to ineffective complaints by disorganized parents who can be browbeaten by someone with a string of degrees.

There is an instructive counter-example.  Over the past fifty years, our nation has experienced an uninterrupted slide into leftism in all aspects of life - save one: While every other leading indicator has shown Americans to be becoming more liberal, more statist, more socialistic, and more libertine, those same polls also show increasing revulsion with the practice of abortion.  A growing majority of Americans have realized that abortion does, in fact, stop a beating heart and kill children.

Why the difference?  Because, while conservatives have used every political means at their disposal to roll back the tide of abortion, they have placed equal emphasis on education - persuading ordinary, non-political Americans that abortion is simply wrong by clearly explaining just what it is.  The left is furious and fuming, but they have been unable to stop the ongoing march of truth; the more they talk about abortion, the more people think about it and the more they feel ill.

It has taken a hundred years, but finally, finally, conservatives have begun to realize the insidious impact of liberalism in our schools.  As irritated as homosexual activists are that their agenda has been stopped in many states, they have only to look to the schools to realize that, in a decade or two, their opponents will have mostly died leaving voters who've been brought up to the strain of the mantra "Gay is OK!"

Most products of American universities would never think the question the idea that the Federal government can regulate, command, and control basically any activity in the country; is that not the natural order of things?

By instilling the fundamental precepts of liberalism in our next generation from the earliest age, the Left has won 90% of the battle - but not all.

We see the rise of homeschooling over the past thirty years and the exponential growth in private schooling.  These alternatives, as important as they are, can never provide a voting majority of well-educated Americans who understand our nation's founding principles and are able to critically think about liberal dogma.

If we are ever to see a return to the limited government of the Constitution, we have no choice but to take back the public schools.  The conservative majority on Texas' Board of Education, whose names none of us have never heard of and who will never be listed in any textbook, have won the first victory in that great battle.

It's up to all of us to ensure that it isn't the last.