In the New York Times Sunday Magazine published on February 11, an article by Russel Shorto called “How Christian Were the Founders?” looked into recent efforts by the Texas school board to inject into history and civics curriculum the idea that America was founded officially as a Christian nation. Their other aim is to wipe out the idea of separation of church and state, since it wasn’t stated in the founding documents of the United States.
Because Texas buys more textbooks than most (or all other) states in the country, publishers shape their textbooks based on guidelines chosen in the Lone Star State. The logic is simple: they don’t want their books to go unsold. But this has a toxic effect on the rest of the country, because only one textbook version is produced at a time — regardless of what other states want.
Remember in 2008 when we heard all that fuss about whether Creationism should be taught in schools alongside Darwin’s theory of natural selection? That fight was spearheaded by the Texas school board, which at the time was led by Dr. Don McLeroy — a dentist with no background whatsoever in education, history, civics, or economics. According to Shorto, textbook publishers let McLeroy run through their book drafts to make adjustments as he sees fit!
That Creationism effort was a failure for the Republican majority in the Texas school board. It also led to McLeroy being removed from his position as chairman of the board, because of the conflict presented by his extreme religious views. But a New York Times article from March 12 informs us that, this time around, they actually won.
I shouldn’t imply that it comes as a surprise. The conservative/Republican/Christians (take your pick of title) on the board vote as a block, so currently they can do almost whatever they want. Not only that, but their aims are extremely specific. “As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, ‘The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.’”
To state my reaction briefly, this scares the shit out of me. This is different than the disorganized rabble chirped back and forth on cable news programs. This is organized crime… in the public school system!!! It would be one thing if they were arguing on the basis that students are getting an inadequate education, but they admit that their aims are solely political. (The ironic part is that these conservative Christians probably send their own kids to Christian schools. They shouldn’t even get a say in the matter of public education.)
I normally don’t discuss politics in length on this blog, but the topic of education has been dominating my mind lately. The school system may be under attack by these troglodytes, but I would argue that it was already broken. Or I should say, there is no proper system in place to ensure that people are encouraged and have enough opportunity to educate themselves to the level required by modern society.
I just got a copy of R. Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and the first subject he brings up is that modern “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success” (p 12). He claims that this is the product of the most powerful men throughout history, organizing society in a way that suited their needs. He still has to prove that to me; I think it might be more appropriately viewed as the result of us not being prepared for the complications of consciousness. Regardless, today the specialization is the result of the ridiculous level of power held by corporations and the government, and — on the other end — the cause of the alienation and frustration experienced by the individual trying to fulfill his right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
What I’m saying here is that the education system we assume to be fully-functioning is actually producing a society of individuals in arrested development (yes, I do intend to build on that concept by discussing the popular Fox TV show from the mid 2000s). We’re brought to a point where we can get an hourly wage job or, if we get a college degree, an institutionalized office job — but it stops at that point because, from the view of those in power, too much education is dangerous for the status quo. That system is collapsing from within, since a world full of uneducated people is a world doomed to fail — hence, the Great Recession, global warming, bank and auto bailouts, etc.
Fuller extends the idea of specialization to all our cultural categorizations (which is why I’m boycotting the Census!!!) like race, religion, nationality, and so on. As he writes, “By the twenty-first century it either will have become evident to humanity that these questions (of intellectual specialization) are absurd and anti-evolutionary or men will no longer be living on Earth” (p. 19, I added the parenthetical info).
But before Fuller hijacks this post, let me return to the point. This fight isn’t a move to improve the American public school system; it’s a deliberate move to make it worse. The school board conservatives are basing their argument on one fact: that a concept so ingrained in American life that we take it for granted — the separation of church and state — is not found in any of our country’s founding documents, like the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. In fact it was first seen in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson, in reply to a representative of a smaller church who felt his denomination was being persecuted by more powerful churches.
To make matters worse, the Declaration of Independence does use language implying that our nation was founded “under God” and that Americans have “certain inalienable rights” bestowed upon them by that God. So although there is no religion-speak in the Constitution, one tactic used by the school board was to bind the Declaration and the Constitution in history texts — as if they were actually the same thing. Therefore, it can be deduced that the Constitution contains Christian language, and America was founded as a Christian nation.
Of course the founders of the United States were religious people. They had fled their native lands because of religious persecution. They understood more than the founders of any country on earth that church and state must be separate, for the alternative unavoidably leads to tyranny. To me it’s pure nonsense to suggest that the founders had actually intended us to be a Christian nation — just as much as it was nonsense how Bush tried to pitch his fundamentalist creed on us from ’01 to ’09. But then I already knew that our society is defined more by absurdity than any kind of sense.
Trying to juggle all this nonsense hurts my brain, so I suggest you read Shorto’s incredible (but really, really long) article to comprehend the issue better. My intention here was to illustrate that our school system is beyond broken, but — like in many other areas of society — we probably can’t expect that the system will ever improve. It’s too institutionalized. I’m not arguing for home schooling, but we’ll have to brainstorm alternatives to this secretive ideological brainwashing going on in our K-12 schools.
Talk about fighting a 12-headed monster. For their widespread idiocy, Christians are really well organized in their efforts at manifesting hell on Earth. I wish I could laugh when they go on about the “liberal establishment” — I can’t even figure out what that refers to. “Liberals” don’t have an establishment, any force as binding as religion that guides their efforts at progress, politically or otherwise.
Liberals do have great literature though. Sometimes I feel like all great writers have been unequivocally liberal in that they worked solely to push mankind forward. Orwell was prominent in that camp, and whenever I hear about these insane ongoings my mind instantly recalls his warning in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
We have to fight all efforts to control and manipulate the past, or else our future — and the future of our progeny — will be jeopardized beyond repair.
(I found the above photo of Don McLeroy on the blog Hot Dogs, Pretzels, and Perplexing Questions.)
