The Texas Textbook Massacre

Not so long ago, we had some fun at the expense of the Texas State Board of Education, when we found out that they had confused our friend and comrade Bill Martin, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, with Bill Martin, Jr., the author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? But we almost knew that this couldn't be the end of the story, just because now the T.S.B.E. would be on our radar.

So it happens that the Bill-Martin-mix-up is only one part of a much larger process. At the moment the Texas State Board of Education is rewriting the standards for their textbooks. The title of Mariah Blake's article summarizes the process: the 'Texas Education Board Is Trying to Infuse Schoolbooks with Ultraconservative Ideology.' This would be a laughing matter, except for the fact that Texas is one of the largest markets for textbooks, and as you can imagine, publishers are willing to rewrite history to make the cold, hard cash. California, of course, usually acts as a liberal balance to the Texas textbook massacre, but with the current budget woes of the Golden State, it won't be buying textbooks until at least 2014.

So what might kids in other states be learning, if their smaller market state buys the same books? Of course evolution is going to be omitted or eviscerated. What about history? Blake writes:

[David] Barton [former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party]'s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes -- if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as "ethical capitalism." They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project [Don] McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, "Read the latest on McCarthy -- He was basically vindicated."

Ethical Capitalism? No wonder they got in such a huff with Ethical Marxism. Call me cynical, but I'm sure they can come up with something crazier than that. Oh, wait. Here it is:

On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the "original war against Islamic Terrorism." What's more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant -- the most obvious example being their push to swap the term "democratic" for "republican" when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the "atrocious" treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, "it might be much more appropriate that demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government." He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans. [...] while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn't be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, "Only majorities can expand political rights in America's constitutional society." Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites -- in his view, mostly white Republican men.

Somebody should let the guy know that it's the Democratic Party, not the Democrat Party. But that's a minor point in the larger revisionism. It makes you wish that these people would just home school their kids and keep their hands off of our 'socialist' system of public education.

If Bill Martin is Banned...

Last month, Bill Martin, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and Bill Martin, Jr., author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? were recently confused by the credulous and intellectual-curiosity-averse (or curiously intellectually averse?) Texas State Board of Education. The cause for the mix up is the search engine at Border's, or more than likely, the fact that the Board's members were satisfied with the results of the list resulting from the search (see the articles at the Chronicle of Higher Ed and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram).

As a result, Bill Martin, author of Ethical Marxism (the offending title), Humanism and Its Aftermath: The Shared Fate of Deconstruction and Politics, amongst other titles (including two books on prog rock) has endured a bit of minor celebrity (note to B.M: I don't mean this as an insult), which included being rightly identified by the Board itself as the author of books containing "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system." Which of course they'd rather ban than refute. (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? has apparently suffered a bit of banishment.)

All of this misses the larger question, however. With Bill Martin and Bill Martin banned, we have yet to consider what the children read will read in their stead. My suggestions:

Marx for Beginners
This is Bill Martin's own suggestion. No qualms here. I read this one some time ago, back when I used to work near a corporate bookstore/personal-lunch-break-library. Lots of pictures, a bit of the essentials and a sense of humor.

Howard Zinn, A People's History of American Empire
My friend Santi has been trying to convince teachers in California's education system to teach this book, and he says two have taken him up. Let's hope they don't mess with Texas. As I wrote with Zinn's passing:

Zinn took history and stood it on its feet. Chronicles of war and great deeds become a constant series of attempts to oppress or calm the fires of social struggle, but the guiding thread is the resilience of people acting from the basic conviction that their rights and their justice won't be realized because these things have been written down on a few dusty documents. They have to be fought for. Zinn was right their in midst of it: like Vonnegut, he learned the right lessons from war's injustices, at Spellman he was radicalized by the growing civil rights struggle at the cost of his job, and then wrote on of the earliest books critical of the Vietnam War, VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1967; A People's History of the United States followed in 1980. He stayed involved, kept writing, kept pissing off other people in his profession and academia for a refusal to be a specialist and to keep to a small academic niche.

Bill Martin, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations
Damn! How did this end up back on the reading list?! Well, you can't stay under the Board's supervision for your whole life, and if Martin is going to receive a bit of attention, we should not allow this moment to go by without talking about his work. After meeting Bill at the most recent North American Sartre Society meeting in Memphis, I discovered that my own interests in Sartre bear some resemblance to subjects covered in his work. So when I found a copy of The Radical Project I picked it up for the personal library.

Many of the essays, especially the one dedicated to overcoming "Sartrophobia," show how Sartre's legacy remains important to contemporary political and philosophical problems. Martin identifies several points of reproach between the post-structuralists and Sartre to show where the latter's work is still relevant. This often rests on the ethical aspect of Sartre's work, because Martin's problem with the reception of post-structuralism in North America is that it has often been accompanied with the de-politicization of the work of the post-structuralists, which is the case, especially, he argues, with Derrida. In addition, Martin's arguments regarding the relationship between Sartre and Marxism, and what they offer to each other, are both clear and conversant in the debates between Leninism and Maoism. I've found the book to be very engaging and thought provoking. The only discouraging part of these Sartrean Investigations is that many of the problems discussed in the book (published in 2000) are still problems today.

Nevertheless, I look forward, as I develop my own work on the relationship between Maoism, Sartre and Badiou, to engaging Bill at future conferences on the merits of Ethical Marxism, Derrida and this other Sartrean legacy with which I am engaged.