Last week the Texas Board of Education debated the statewide curricula most notably the social studies curriculum. These board members are elected officials— not experts or professional historians— though according to the March 12 issue of The New York Times “some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.”
What upset people however was not the makeup of the Board but its decisions. The aforementioned bloc (10 of the 15 members) espouses conservative values— they question Darwin they believe the founding fathers were guided by Christian principles and they dislike Thomas Jefferson for coining the term “separation of church and state.”
On this last point the Board decided to replace Jefferson on a list of Enlightenment thinkers students should know with Calvin Aquinas and Blackstone. It also neglected to add notable Hispanics to the history of the Mexican-American War. Nuanced defenses of McCarthy and criticism of Johnson’s Great Society were included in the curriculum however comprising a neat Republican package that passed along party lines 10-5.
The influence of this decision goes beyond Texas. Since Texas is the second most populous state textbook publishers tailor their American History texts to Texan standards. And since the most populous state California is so persnickety about its curriculum Texas really sets national standards for what students will learn. This is especially true given the primacy of the textbook in America. Indeed the textbook is the cornerstone of public secondary civics education and far more influential than the teacher. The teachers who write test questions from their own words and research are far fewer than the mass of underpaid overworked non-history majors who pull test questions straight from the book. In too many classrooms practice questions at the end of chapters stand a good chance of becoming actual test questions.
So if most students are simply learning by rote in public schools what they are memorizing is very important. Since these schools are public it is not just a matter of what parents want students to learn but what parents and special interest groups can lobby politicians to include in curricula and thus force students to learn (unless attentive parents intervene). Because make no mistake— anything run by the government is ultimately backed by a monopoly of coercive force. Thus this debate about an American history curriculum is really a battle over what will be the state-sanctioned monolithic account of how things were.
Everyone ought to stop fooling themselves. There is no one authoritative history in America or anywhere else. Bias is inherent to historiography. No matter how closely a historian scrutinizes sources and attempts to balance one account with another by the very selection of some sources over others a particular account is written; not all sources can be included and that is OK.
Truth must still be sought though and certain histories will do this better than others. Simply because there is no one irrefutable account does not make all accounts equally valid or valuable. It would behoove the people of this nation to start compiling the truths of their own stories and presenting them alongside many others rather than jostling to write their own pages in the state-approved story book of what really happened. This can take the form of textbook-free classrooms that rely on articles and primary sources or free association of like-minded individuals to educate their children in a certain tradition (read: private schools). Embracing our differences has always made us stronger as a nation and it is what will keep us ahead in the coming decades even as European countries wrestle to redefine what it means for them to no longer be ethnic nations. The beauty of this civic nation is forged in the fires of pluralism. E pluribus unum: “Out of many one.”
