Winston Smith, the central character in George Orwell’s 1984 works for the Ministry of Truth, going through old newspaper articles and modifying them to fit Big Brother’s agenda. He writes in his diary: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
Modifying and adjusting the past is a means to an end, a way in which the people in power can gain more power, more control. This sort of thing would never happen in a country like America.
Right?
Wrong. On March 12, the Texas Board of Education approved a number of new standards for social science textbooks that actively re-write or re-word the past. Thomas Jefferson has been removed in favor of John Calvin, learning about the concept of separation of church and state is no longer a requirement, references to capitalism are to be replaced with references to a “free enterprise system” and, apparently, the board removed the concepts of “justice” and “responsibility for the common good” from a list of characteristics of good citizenship for grades one through three. (The proposal to remove “equality” failed.) The Texas Freedom Network does a good job of summing up exactly what’s wrong with this new list of standards: http://tfninsider.org/ and if it doesn’t make you want to scream, I have a copy of 1984 you can borrow.
I support an open debate in this country, but children’s history textbooks are not the place for religious/political propaganda. If a conservative/Christian/whatever figure is of great historical importance, sure, toss him/her in there, but do not do it as a way to eliminate others. For an ideology that claims to be pro-American in every way, the conservative majority on the Texas Board of Education is stripping away those things that make us who we are. Separation of church and state is absolutely vital to the way this country works—the much vaunted pilgrims were not fleeing hordes of transsexuals, they were seeking religious freedom.
When it comes to changing “capitalism” to “free enterprise system,” the Orwellian connotations grow stronger. Capitalism remains capitalism, no matter if, as one board member put it, “capitalism does have a negative connotation.” Debating the merits of capitalism, or any economic system, is something that should be encouraged: Kids are being educated to work in this system and they need to know the ideology behind their workplace. Changing the name does not strip the system of benefits or detriments. For a political culture that often complains about political correctness, this attempt to make capitalism seem like something else is obnoxiously hypocritical.
Changing the past—through omission, through changing the terms, through actual fabrication of a different history—is always a bad thing. Unless you are basing your modification of the past on factual evidence, you are committing a crime toward your fellow countrymen. These Texan students are going to suffer for 10 of the 15 board members’ political ideology.
Moreover, because it’s cheaper to manufacture one textbook for all schools, companies that make books for Texas are likely going to deliver the same product to other states, potentially resulting in every American student receiving this overtly biased version of the past. As justification for this new standard, board member Don McLeroy said the following: “We are adding balance … history has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.”
Academia, unlike the average board of education (as a victim of St. Louis Public Schools, I’ve seen this first hand) is based on research and evidence. This research can be shown to be incorrect, and then modified; editing the information to suit a political point of view does nothing more than garner power and attention for an ideology.
In a different, arguably better world than this, textbooks would be informative only, with teachers and students allowed to fill in the gaps with opinions and their various political affiliations. In ours, this is not so. Books such as “Lies My Teacher Told Me” by James W. Loewen cover the disadvantages and biases of assorted textbooks, but none, as far as I am aware, have suffered from such outright ideological alterations as those soon to be enacted by the Texas Board of Education.
I can’t at this time offer a suggestion as to what we could do to improve this situation, but I can say that the best way to prevent these sorts of changes taking hold is to maintain open minds, to try to learn as much as we can about, well, everything, and to encourage that same mindset in everyone we meet. Big Brother only works if we refuse to learn, refuse to question, if we accept political dogma blindly. If we do this, and with a little luck, Winston Smith will forever be out of a job.
