The great state of Texas is about to change our understanding of the Enlightenment for its high school students. The State Board of Education rejected the old understanding of the Enlightenment–the one where students were expected to learn how to “explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present.” In its deep wisdom, the Board, in a 10-5 party-line vote, has just revised its social-studies curriculum.
The conservative majority has concocted a revision of the old curriculum that rewrites a fair amount of history, much of the time by subtly changing little phrases or substituting words like “leadership” for “role” when the text talks about a hallowed Republican such as Nixon, but occasionally by stepping in to effect a major overhaul. The Enlightenment, in particular, was subjected to such profound tinkering that it really ought to be renamed. I propose calling it, “The New and Improved, Texas-Style Enlightenment.”
In the new Texas version, the word “Enlightenment” is nowhere to be found. Instead students will learn to “explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and Sir William Blackstone.”
Huh? The very word “Enlightenment” can no longer be uttered? Thomas Jefferson, kaput? Apparently, according to the Texas Board. Jefferson never should have written that darn phrase “separation of church and state,” nor let anyone see his deist cards. And who could have guessed that the Texas Board, made up of regular Texans—lawyers, a dentist, a real estate guy, some teachers, etc.—would have ferreted out what Enlightenment scholars have missed all these years: Aquinas and Calvin are critical to understanding the Enlightenment, while Jefferson is not.
The perversion of knowledge into state propaganda resembles nothing so much as what the Communist bloc did to ideas in the mid-20th century. More fearful of ideas than guns, they simply banned any ideas they didn’t like. In wiping out Jefferson, in particular, the Texas board looks a lot like the communists who used to airbrush out of official state photos those who had been executed after the famous Czech show trials early in the 1950s.
This is a preliminary approval, subject to public comment. The final vote is supposed to take place in May.
11 Responses to The Enlightenment, Texas Style
7738373863 - March 15, 2010 at 10:09 am
One would think that after the Bill Martin fiasco–confusing the writer of beloved children’s books with a Marxist historian–the Texas Board might have acquired some humility, but apparently not. What happened to the Enlightenment in Texas is an example of populism gone bad, of stampeding the populace under the banner of a former bumper sticker of the region: “God said it, I believe it, and that’s the end of it.” The deep historical irony is that many of the early settlers of Texas were refugees of the European cataclysm of 1848, and no matter what they thought of the big ideas that caused the revolutions of that year, they were at least conversant with those ideas–and, by extension, with their Enlightenment roots.For what it’s worth, the very thought of such a conclave of the unenlightened setting curriculum for millions is appalling.
uconnche - March 15, 2010 at 11:01 am
The Czech show trials, also known as the Slansky trials, began in November, 1951. The Czech Communist putsch took place in February, 1948. I have seen this error made elsewhere, by people who should know better. It is dispiriting to see academics be so careless about fundamental matters of fact and accuracy.
cleverclogs - March 15, 2010 at 11:06 am
According to the Times article, since Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks, this text will become to norm across states. Time to boycott textbooks and textbook companies, I’d say. They usually stink anyway.Actually, I have no problem including more thinkers – go on, include Aquinas and Calvin, AND Thomas More and Erasmus (always popular with the kids) and Luther and of course, bring back Jefferson (absurd idea to exclude him). Bring it all on because when you stand these thinkers up next to each other, I think the shallowness of, say, Luther and Calvin’s thought will reveal itself. They’re writers of faith, but they don’t argue nearly as clearly or as compellingly as people like Aquinas and Erasmus, writers of both faith and logic. More information is always better, right?I understand they also want to replace the word “capitalism” with “free enterprise system” but “laissez-faire free enterprise system” will still come out smelling like crap so again I say, let them taint the words they want to use reframe history. A capitalist system by any other name would smell the same.But still, boycott the textbook manufacturers for having no spine (no pun intended).
suomynona - March 15, 2010 at 11:35 am
FWIW, I would stand in and fight against silly euphmemisms for capitalism. I take this position after watching a John Stossel clip in which he’s criticizing the Obama administration for giving out stimulus money contracts to certain producers (e.g. environment-friendly window companies) that he apparently likes. Stossel keeps repeating the phrase “this isn’t capitalism…it’s CRONY CAPITALISM.” Failing to realize that cronyism is part and parcel of both capitalism itself and any close marriage between business and government elites (produced by capitalism as frequently and effeciently as any other system, but more discreetly, making it even more dangerous), Stossel tries to pull a fast one on us. He separates out and simply redefines the negative aspects of the capitalist system for which he incessantly aims to apologize. This is to say that by swapping terms and neologizing common, long-used historical terms like ‘capitalism,’ people already ‘revise’ history with or without the textbooks.
falzf - March 15, 2010 at 12:10 pm
To #2 uconnch: Thank you for the correction of the date. Laurie
dank48 - March 15, 2010 at 1:26 pm
This sort of thing has been going on for decades. The state of Texas is such a behemoth that its preferences tend to have a huge effort on U.S. textbooks as a whole. Sometimes the effects are more pernicious than others. About the idea of spineless textbook publishers being the problem: No, the textbook publishers who had spines either went broke a long time ago, trying to buck the tide, or survived by abandoning the field to those who were more willing to adjust the facts to suit the Lone Star fantasy.
_perplexed_ - March 15, 2010 at 3:39 pm
I now understand the basis for conservative attacks on liberals in academia– If one believes that education is merely indoctrination, then who controls the message is paramount. The “Texas State Board of Education” indeed!
jamary - March 15, 2010 at 4:57 pm
Replace ‘capitalism’ with “free-market”? The right is using a two-edged sword here. First, they associate the word ‘capitalism’ – that is, the accurate use of that word to describe a generic economic system which obtains nearly everywhere in the world today (with beginnings, arguably, some 800-600 years ago), with those who specify that system in order to critique it, most notably one-19th Century, half-jewish German upstart whom the right would like very much for the world to forget (along with the title of his major work). Second – capitalism as a generic form does not, however the right wants to deny this, preclude regulation in the public interest. By replacing ‘capitalism’ with “free-market”, the right wants to teach that anything but laissez-faire capitalsim is NOT capitalism and NOT “free-enterprise”. To wit, the right wants to teach that ANY democratic interference with markets, production, or finance constitutes something bad, …real bad, like what that German advocated and wrote an infamous manifesto about.And there is a third part, the hilt of the sword which can be used to bludgeon the unsuspecting (who are to be kept forever in the dark by a school system which polices teachers to avoid the forbidden ideas – or would if it could) – and that is this very insidious component of convervative ideology: that the whole notion of freedom – and perhaps liberty – embodied in the American political tradition is fully encompassed in and not at all contradicted by laissez-faire capitalism, i.e., the “free market”. ‘Freedom’ = “free-market. Therefore, any regulation of the free market (which might still describe a capitalist system, as in that Marxist backwater, Europe – and dangerously closer, Canada (!!! – recall that Canada is the sanctuary of anti-facist democracy in Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here) is a denial of ‘freedom’, hence, unAmerican, unConstitutional, Tyrannical, etc., etc. That is what the Texan schoolboard wants American school children to learn and believe.
akprof - March 15, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Dover Delaware repeated! Who’s surprised?
tech2doc - March 23, 2010 at 2:10 am
Good thing Wikipedia is around to fill in the details.Textbooks become even more irrelevant with the passing of the years….
filmdoctor42 - April 16, 2010 at 11:23 pm
This article is truly bizarre, and incredibly ignorant. Some of the Founding Fathers may have been influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, but they really were not influenced by the European Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment which overturned liberty and religion for the vague term “equality” and led to the beginnings of fascism and socialism, the two scourges of the 20th Century which murdered nearly 200 million people. To use the term “Enlightened” for some of these characters, especially for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is terribly misguided. As M. Stanton Evans has shown in his book THE THEME IS FREEDOM, the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are founded on the Bible and on Christian thought from Christ onward. The Texas school board is merely making a corrective to the far left’s control of academia, including the influence of the radical socialists now leading the teacher unions.