This is from the “Read­ings” sec­tion in the August 2010 issue of Harper’s, and I have been read­ing it over try­ing to decide what fright­ens me most about it.

The con­tent of edu­ca­tion is always, always, polit­i­cal and there will always be some­one some­where who thinks her or his per­spec­tive has been left out of what chil­dren are taught, to their detri­ment as indi­vid­u­als and to the detri­ment of soci­ety as a whole. Inde­pen­dently of that, thought, I am a big believer in try­ing to find as many ways as pos­si­ble to include as many per­spec­tives as pos­si­ble in the class­room, not to make the point that they are all equally valid, but to make the point that the more informed we are about those per­spec­tives, even the ones that have been shown to be invalid, the more respon­si­ble and account­able we are likely to be in our own per­spec­tives. The pro­posed changes to his­tory and social stud­ies cur­ricu­lum recorded here, made by Texas State Board of Edu­ca­tion mem­ber Don McEl­roy – and if you have not read about the Texas text book con­tro­versy ear­lier this year, here’s a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle that gives a taste of it – are prob­lem­atic on their face because they so clearly favor an overtly con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal agenda, but three things stuck out to me in particular:

• Remov­ing dis­cus­sion of pro­pa­ganda as one of the rea­sons that the United States entered World War I so fal­si­fies what goes on when any nation decides to go to war – and I am obvi­ously talk­ing here about the gov­ern­ment pro­pa­ganda directed at that nation’s pub­lic to gar­ner sup­port for the war – that it trans­forms what­ever lessons are taught in the con­text of this cur­ricu­lum change from edu­ca­tion into propaganda.
• The third para­graph down about “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions to usurp the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion tran­si­tion­ing from U.S. sov­er­eignty to global gov­er­nance” is fright­en­ing not only because it sug­gests that the U.S. has, and should have, an agenda to become, essen­tially, the gov­er­nor of the world, but also because it is so badly writ­ten – unless I have read it wrong; and I have read it over more than a few times now – that it gram­mat­i­cally attrib­utes “threats to indi­vid­ual free­dom and lib­erty” not to the sup­posed “efforts by glob­al­ist orga­ni­za­tions,” but to the Con­sti­tu­tion itself.
• Cur­ricu­lum guide­lines that com­pare his­tor­i­cal fig­ures to fic­tional char­ac­ters as if those fic­tional char­ac­ters were real – and remem­ber these are his­tory and social stud­ies, not lit­er­a­ture guide­lines – sound like some­thing out of Orwell’s 1984 or some other dystopian novel. That Mr. McEl­roy and who­ever advised him could not find an exam­ple of real life opti­mistic immi­grants to com­pare with Upton Sin­clair, Susan B. Anthony, Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois seems to me say more about the canyon-wide gaps in their edu­ca­tion than these pro­posed changes could ever say about the osten­si­ble lib­eral bias in edu­ca­tion that they are sup­posed to correct.

I don’t know if these pro­posed changes passed, but that they should have been put for­ward as seri­ous and sub­stan­tive, that they should have been taken seri­ously at all, really scares me.