Brainwash

The Texas school board’s recent decisions to make the local curriculum more conservative is troublesome in light of the state’s disproportionate influence on national textbook sales. “Country music is an important modern cultural movement; hip-hop isn’t. Thomas Jefferson deserves to be erased from a list of ‘great Americans’, but Ronald Reagan doesn’t. And we should re-evaluate Senator Joe McCarthy: he was almost certainly a national hero. If you think that sounds like a quirky rewriting of American history with a right-wing twist, then you’re not alone. But if the state of Texas gets its way, it’ll be what teachers across the rest of the nation are required to tell their students. In a move that has sparked controversy from coast to coast, together with a slew of headlines about the “Texas schoolbook massacre”, the Lone Star state has just narrowly approved a series of conservative-minded alterations to its social studies curriculum.”