Texas and the Textbook Alamo

Texas and the Textbook Alamo
Sandy Rios
Friday, March 12, 2010

In the days of the Soviet Union, children in schools learned that Russians invented the airplane and the refrigerator. They learned there was no God and that the glorious days of the union began and ended with Marxism. History texts were rewritten to eliminate any mention of Holy Mother Russia, the Orthodox Church, the Czars or Peter the Great. The new understanding of the world included “equality,” “fairness” with no differences in gender.

Women worked the same as men. Children were raised in government day care and educated by the state. Loyalty to the Communist Party was demanded above family. Children were encouraged to report parents, neighbor to spy on neighbor, and evolution the foundation for it all. Schools taught that through Darwinian evolution we evolved randomly so therefore there was no God but central government. All music and performance praised it … clothing symbolized it. The Soviet world was monolithic, monochromatic and atheistic—and propaganda filled public school textbooks from the censoring of history to the eradication of the acknowledgement of God to the unwavering embrace of evolution. For 50 years it was so. Dissenters were sent to the Gulag or to reeducation camps … declared “mentally ill,” shunned and punished severely.

What children are taught in public school matters. Whole societies have been altered by indoctrinating them. And that’s why a battle has been fought for decades on what should be included in American school texts. In the ’90s a bill proposed in the Illinois legislature called simply “The American Heritage Act” declared that references to God in historical documents should not be censored. It failed. And so, without the knowledge of most parents, any mention of God by George Washington or Abraham Lincoln, the Mayflower Compact, the Supreme Court, were censored in school textbooks profoundly altering our national story and building into our children a secularism the Founding Fathers never intended.

And it didn’t just happen in social studies curricula. Rather than majoring on the disciplines of biology or chemistry, science textbooks morphed into treatises for the environmental movement. Since the ’70s, American students have been deluged with politically correct concerns over population control, the rain forest and the ozone layer. So, after a history of being taught the theory of evolution as fact, students are now besieged by so-called evidence of man made global warming. While countless students have been exposed to Al Gore’s now-discredited “Inconvenient Truth” documentary, few have been allowed to see “Expelled,” challenging the suppression of free intellectual discussion on scientific theories of origin. And don’t expect the indoctrination of our kids to end any time soon. The New York Times just reported that “Under President Obama … the Climate Education Interagency Working Group … is making a strong push toward ‘climate literacy’ for teachers and students.”

In the article “Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets,” the New York Times warns against conservatives and white evangelicals who dare to disbelieve the man-made global warming theory. The article lambasts states introducing legislation to promote “critical thinking” on evolution, the origins of life, global warming and human cloning.” That same article refers to scientists who embrace intelligent design as “deniers of evolution.” The author states emphatically “for mainstream scientists, there is no credible challenge to evolutionary theory,” and then adds, “There is wide agreement among scientists that global warming is occurring and that human activities are probably driving it.” Really?

Recently leaked e-mails exchanged by scientists at the very heart of current global warming theory in East Anglia, England, show the manipulation of data and the hiding of other evidence counter to man-made global warming. Add to that new information debunking the reports of glaciers melting and the increasingly vocal criticism of scientists worldwide over the embarrassment the man-made global warming movement has been to the scientific community. These reports are becoming common knowledge, hardly just embraced by conservatives or white evangelicals.

In spite of those particular wheels coming off the global warming bus, President Obama is pushing hard to make sure American students have the propaganda on the issue they need.

Given the disgrace of the scientific community over the global warming debacle, the New York Times is correct to acknowledge a similarity in concerns over teaching evolution and global warming. If the scientific community has so willingly gone along with faulty reports and theories on global warming, haven’t we been correct to question their claims that evolution is more than the theory Charles Darwin said it was?

The Texas School board is grappling with such issues for the moment in regard to Social Studies. A move is once again afoot to rewrite American history and to solidify the teaching of evolution and global warming in America’s classrooms. Because of sheer size of the public school system in Texas and the volume of textbooks purchased, textbook manufacturers use Texas as their testing ground for the content of most books purchased for the rest of the 50 states.

As for the former Soviet Union? After 50 years of anti-God, Communist propaganda, the Russian people (and the people of the former Soviet satellite states) were in a state of confusion as freedom came and truth rushed in.

In 1991, a neurologist named Dr. Clara Labadinskia was explaining the scientific understanding of autism in the children she lovingly treated. She began by tracing it back to evolution. Her words were eloquent, her passion and concern evident in her sad, blue eyes. But as she reached the conclusion of her discourse, she peered off into the distance and said, “But we are beginning to think … that maybe there is a God.”

That’s why the decisions Texas make are so important to the future of the republic … It’s an education Alamo, no less important than that standoff so long ago.