Country music and Reganism take centre stage
Written by Dan Howse
“While it is easy to see this issue as an American concern, it has very real implications for the entire world. Reshaping history to pander to certain political ideologies isn’t just immoral: it’s incredibly dangerous.”
Imagine a history course without hip-hop. Imagine a history course without Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Imagine a history course without Thomas Jefferson, the separation of church and state or any sort of distinction made between gender and sex. Does that sound like American History to you?
Well, as of March 12, it is.
A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded in removing all of the aforementioned topics in exchange for country music as a cultural movement and favourable representations of Reganism, Calvinism, McCarthyism and the National Rifle Association, among other pro-Conservative ideologies, figures and groups. The board also downplayed Latin Americans, specifically activists, and encouraged the studying of violent civil war protests by the Black Panthers. While some onlookers might sarcastically claim that these subjects are a more accurate representation of the views of Texans, this is no laughing matter. Aside from the obvious alteration of in-state history, this historical rewrite will affect Americans far beyond the borders of Texas.
Because Texas is one of the largest purchasers of textbooks in the United States, there is now an economic incentive to produce these questionable history textbooks at a mass scale. However, more importantly, Texas is the only state in the nation to have uniform educational standards throughout the state from kindergarten to Grade 12. With no other state lobbying as powerfully for other standards, there is a real likelihood that the impact of these textbooks reaches beyond Texas. While some industry representatives have claimed that digitalization of media will promote other interpretations and hopefully limit these textbooks from becoming the national standard, many critics of the policy maintain that various under funded school boards will frequently purchase the cheapest textbooks. As anyone who has studied capitalism can tell you, or as it was recently renamed, the free enterprise system, the most manufactured books invariably become the most affordable.
While it is easy to see this issue as an American concern, it has very real implications for the entire world. Reshaping history to pander to certain political ideologies isn’t just immoral: it’s incredibly dangerous. Doing so dissolves the very fabric of democracy in America. Then again, as future Texas students will tell you, America isn’t “democratic”: it’s a “constitutional republic”.
For all the corporate sponsorship in healthcare legislation, for all the repression of populist regimes in foreign countries, for all the excessive and prohibitive costs an education in America incurs, these have all been problems of the present. These controversial policies might be socially responsible or they may not, but regardless, they were topics that would to some degree, be discussed in the classroom. The rewriting of history is a problem of an entirely different scope; the Orwellian changes to yesterday do not cripple the educational system of today, they poison it for the youth of tomorrow.
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