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Last Friday, the right-wing majority on the Texas board of education voted to approve new social studies standards for the state’s five million public school students.
Texas students already have the Ten Commandments posted in every classroom and schools have been allowed to replace counselors with unlicensed “chaplains.” Now the state will require Bible readings for students’ entire progression through the education system.
Members of both the Republican-controlled legislature and the board were clear that they hope to inject not just religion but as much Christianity as possible into public education.
“We’re going to stop watering down American history. We’re going to teach the truth. Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state,” said board member Brandon Hall, a pastor from an intensely conservative part of rural north Texas.
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What does this less-watered-down version of American history consist of? Among other things, it is animated by the venomous hatred of Muslims that has poured over GOP politics in Texas like a plague. Lessons on the theology and historical contributions of Islam are eliminated and replaced by discussion of radical Islam and the Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.”
And as the Texas Tribune noted, while the prior standards said that students should learn about post-World War I racial violence “including the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the Tulsa Race Massacre,” the new standards “instead suggested that students learn about the Klan’s ‘intolerance’ of Catholics, Jews and immigrants but did not specify Black Americans. They also changed the ‘Tulsa Race Massacre’ to the ‘Tulsa Race Riots.’”
It may not have garnered as much notice as the Bible stories, but the word “intolerance” is an important one.
