Following closely on the heels of a bill passed by the Arizona legislature and signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer severely restricting ethnic studies courses and multicultural curricular inclusion in that state’s schools, the Texas School Board voted in sweeping changing to its social studies curriculum. Considering 213 amendments for changes in the state’s social studies standards, known as the Texas Standards for Knowledge and Skills for grades kindergarten through 12, social conservatives, who comprise the majority of the Board, voted strictly along party lines: nine Republicans, five Democrats.

Board member, Cynthia Dunbar, R-Richmond, high school anatomy and physiology teacher, made her position and the position of the other Christian social conservatives very clear in her opening prayer at the hearing, in which she asserted that U.S. laws and the government itself should be founded on the Christian Bible:

“I believe no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the good book and the spirit of the savior have, from the beginning, been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first charter of Virginia, or the charter of New England, the same objective is present — a Christian land governed by Christian principles. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country. All this I say in the spirit of my lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

Dunbar authored the 2008 book, “One Nation Under God,” arguing that the founders created “an emphatically Christian government” [page 18] and that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test” [page 47].

Among the extensive list of changes to the Texas social studies curriculum include information that presents Confederate President Jefferson Davis on par with Abraham Lincoln; deletion of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; addressing the Civil War as an issue of states’ rights; giving more attention to conservative organizations like the Moral Majority, National Rifle Association and the Heritage Foundation; replacing the term “capitalism” with “free-enterprise system;” referring to the United States as a “constitutional republic” rather than as a “democracy;” questioning whether the United Nations imperils U.S. sovereignty; vindicating McCarthyism of the 1950s; teaching about the Christian influences on the Founders [and I would add even though many did not define themselves as Christians per se, and some considered themselves as secular]; giving expanded information of a list of Confederate officials and conservative political leaders like Phyllis Schaffly; eliminating references to John Madison; refusing to update B.C. and A. D. to B.C.E. and C.E.; watering down and sometimes deleting sections of U.S. civil rights history; watering down and questioning the legal doctrine and rationale for the separation of religion [church] and state. An amendment was proposed, but eventually voted down was a change in the term “Atlantic Slave Trade” to “Atlantic Triangular Trade.”

On a micro level, what the Texas School Board, and earlier the Arizona legislature, show us are some of the ways in which those who hold power determine and define knowledge and how knowledge is consciously and very deliberately produced and disseminated.

In academic parlance, we refer to the concept of hegemony, coined by social theorist Antonio Gramsci, to describe the ways in which the dominant group – in this case socially conservative Christians in general and predominantly Protestants – successfully disseminate dominant social realities and social visions in a manner accepted as common sense, as normal, as universal – even though only an estimated 30 percent of the world’s inhabitants are Christian – and as representing part of the natural order. This dominant-group controlled production of knowledge maintains the marginality of other groups, and it denies all students options in understanding multiple perspectives from which to construct meaning.

This institutionalization of a socially conservative Christian norm or standard functions to legitimize what can be said, who has the authority to speak and be heard, and what is authorized as true or as the truth, while perpetuating the notion that all people are or should be Christian and socially conservative, which thereby continues the privileging of socially conservative Christians and Christianity.

The Texas School Board has clearly taken a retrenchment position away from the very modest gains made in curricular development of providing multiple perspectives, which could stimulate students’ critical thinking skills, to a default monocultural position from a conservative Christian European-heritage perspective. Basically, the Board is confusing education with indoctrination.

Though Texas K-12 students comprise only approximately 8.5 percent, 4.7 million, of the estimated 55.2 million students nationwide, Texas is the second largest textbook market for book publishers. The curricular changes in Texas, therefore, have implications for the content in textbooks nationwide.

—Warren J. Blumenfeld, professor of Curriculum and Instruction