I Hate Texas

Folks,

Wine here, and first of all just go peruse this article from the New York Times today: Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards

Now excuse me because I need to rant.

I had many reactions to this article, most of them visceral and exclamatory which some of the people in this lovely coffee shop did not enjoy.  I also do not have a well reasoned or researched response as I am simply reacting and not forming some elaborate rebuttal.  Mainly because if I had some academic response with footnotes (I’ve been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately so now I want to use them like he does) I would just be brushed aside.  Instead I will use short, easy to understand statements that these dumbasses can easily digest like a Fox News talking point.

After I read this I immediately flashed back to when Obama wanted to give a speech to kids when they were in school.  This was framed as indoctrinating school children with his liberal agenda and in the end it turned out to be a harmless, stay in school/do your best type of speech.  There were no undertones promoting his other domestic or foreign policies, just making sure kids took responsibility for and demanded only the best from their education.  Now these conservative school board members are doing exactly what I’m sure they lambasted Obama of doing – indoctrinating schoolchildren through a shift in perspective to favor their political views.  Their justification?

“We are adding balance,” said Dr. Don McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, after the vote. “History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”

The rest of the article is full of quotes like this and I sat ready and waiting for this to be revealed as some sort of elaborate satire, but no.  This is real and incredibly disturbing.  I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this is the first time curriculums have been amended to favor certain philosophies or that even my own education wasn’t skewed in some way but – gah- it’s just frustrating, that’s all.  My favorite part is the lack of any expert opinion on these curriculum changes.  I’m not even surprised by this fact, it just seems like par for the course.  I especially love the quote where one of the board members sums up the entire field of sociology as a field that “just blames society for all of our problems” when they amended some curriculum to place special emphasis on personal responsibility.  There are far too many tangents to this statement and I only have about 20 minutes left on my free WiFi access here to properly expound upon…

…but oh my good God that may be the genius of the conservative strategy!  Just make sweeping and over generalized statements that put the liberal/academic/intelligent population up in arms and while they’re sitting in their coffee shops sipping on their communist cervezas (read: coffee) the conservatives will just make all of the changes they want!  The left-wing’s critical thinking skills seen as the reason why they are superior to the conservatives are immediately made into an exploitable weakness – a kind of sinister and calculated misdirection.  Maybe the democrats should use this strategy too.  Just agree with the conservatives about something and while they’re off celebrating and offering up sacrifices to a giant Ronald Reagan statue, the democrats can actually take advantage of their majority in both chambers of Congress and get something done.  Yeah no they’ll still find some way to screw it up and we’ll be stuck in this seemingly eternal push and pull for just a while longer.  But that’s OK, because in a few decades we can just alter the curriculum and all will be forgotten.

-Wine

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