Texas Textbook Wars

With Rick Perry in the race for the presidency, you can be sure that liberals are going to bring up the Texas textbook wars. For nearly 40 years, Texas has been fighting yearly battles over textbooks for the simple reason that the choices Texas makes, the nation makes. The decision of the school board of Texas will most likely affect the textbook selection of your public schools in your state. Texas distributes 48 million textbooks every year. This is a huge market if you are a textbook publisher. While California is the nation’s largest textbook market, the state’s financial crisis has not made it a major player. New York and Illinois are also big markets. Any new textbooks are going to be tailored to fit with what the textbook adoption agencies decide in to do in Texas since Texas has money to purchase new textbooks. “The state’s $22 billion education fund is among the largest educational endowments in the country.”[1]

In 1998, under Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), curriculum guidelines were established. There is nothing wrong in establishing guidelines. But we need to be reminded that not everything can be put into a textbook. Some group of editors determines what goes in and what’s left out of a textbook. Then there are the interpretations that are written about the material that gets in. The choice of materials to include and the interpretations that go with them are inevitable.

The two biggest battles are over science and history guidelines. On the science side, some board members want to require science teachers to cover the “strengths and weaknesses” of the theory of evolution. How is such a guideline contrary to the scientific method? Why would anyone object to such a guideline? No one has ever seen evolution take place. Change within a species is not evolution. Think of dog, cattle, and horse breeding. As long as these types of breeding have gone on, they’re still dogs, cattle, and horses. No one was present when supposedly the first sign of biological life squirted its way out of the primordial soup. One of the first rules of biology is that abiogenesis, life originating from non-life, does not happen. And neither does something come from nothing. That’s why Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species and not On the Origin of Life. There is no empirical evidence that any species evolved into another species. Theorizing how it might have happened and showing an artist’s rendering of the postulation doesn’t make it scientifically valid. The theory begs to be questioned.

There are seven Christian conservatives on the Texas school board, and they are causing trouble for the educational establishment. “‘They do vote as a bloc,’ Pat Hardy, a board member who considers herself a conservative Republican but who stands apart from the Christian faction. ‘They work consciously to pull one more vote.’” And liberals have never done this? Give me a break. There is no neutrality. Liberals have had their way for so long that they don’t know how to deal with competition.

MORE