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Transcript:
Wow is it 2009 because I’m about to talk about the Texas State Board of Education using textbooks to violate the separation of Church and State.
No, seriously, back in the late 2000s my site, Skepchick, featured frequent updates from my Texan friend Sam who reported on what was happening. At the time, seven of the fifteen members of the Board of Education were outright Christian fundamentalist creationists whose goal was to stop public schools from teaching the science of evolution.
This was a big story, not just because of the millions of kids in Texas who would be going through school without getting essential education about foundational science, but also because of how Texas influences the rest of the country. Texas is the second largest purchaser of school text books in the United States, and at the time, the number one largest purchaser, California, was having budget issues so they wouldn’t be able to order new books for a while.
That meant that any changes Texas made to the text books would also end up in other states, because the text book printers wouldn’t want to spend extra money producing different versions for different states.
And it wasn’t just evolution: the theocrats on the Texas school board also tried to erase references to climate change, downplay slavery, and overstate the role of Christianity in the founding and culture of the US.
At every step, the school board was challenged by parents, secular activists, and organizations like the now-defunct Texas Citizens for Science and the still-kicking-ass National Center for Science Education. Thanks to their efforts, the creationists weren’t able to achieve all their goals, but they never stopped trying. In 2023, they managed to drop science textbooks from the curriculum for highlighting climate change, and edited the remaining books to do things like removing “a number of diagrams illustrating the evolutionary lineage of human beings from its high school biology textbook, while Discovery Education removed a reference to fossil fuel use contributing to the greenhouse effect in its Grade 6 textbook.”
And now, thanks to the current state of our fascist theocracy, things are going to get even worse. This week, the New York Times published the results of a public records request, revealing disturbing changes not to their science textbooks, but to their English language arts lessons. The changes exclusively focus on inserting Christianity wherever they can, while deleting many mentions of other religions. “Jesus” alone was mentioned 19 times in the previous curriculum, and is now mentioned 87 times.
The New York Times describes how fifth graders (around the age of 10) will now study a psalm as part of a poetry lesson, while first graders (around the age of five or six) will “discuss the parable of the prodigal son alongside stories like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”” And most hypocritically, “Kindergarten children (will) learn in depth about the Book of Genesis in a lesson on art exploration that notes that “many artists have found inspiration for creating art from the words in creation stories in religious books.””
Kindergarten. That’s four or five years old. That’s the age that these same lunatics say is too young to even look at a picture book that features male penguins hatching an egg. The age where it’s “indoctrination” to tell them that some kids have two mommies. Apparently that’s a great age to learn “in depth” about the Book of Genesis.
True story: I was raised Baptist, and when I was around nine or ten I decided to sit down and read the Bible, cover to cover. I had to go back over Genesis several times, first of all because it was so short that I couldn’t believe this was the grand story we learned repeatedly in Sunday School, and second because it was so stupid. To whit, let’s take a look at the sample lesson printed in the New York Times to teach children “sequencing:”
“Ask students to think of the events that were mentioned in the Read-Aloud.
Use the prompts below and support students to order the events of the story.
• Which event happened first? (God created light.)
• What happened next? (God created the seas, dry ground, and vegetation.)
• What happened after that? (God created the fish and birds.)”
Okay, so far so good.
• Then what happened? (God created the animals.)
Well hold on. What the fuck is a fish? What’s a bird? Are they bacteria now?
• What happened last? (God created the first man and woman and the Garden of Eden.)
Okay, so what the fuck are men and women? Are we not animals? Oh, right, the new biology books will probably say we aren’t. Animals are filthy things beneath us.
The nonsensical nature of the Genesis story is bad enough, but of course what’s truly awful here is that kids are going to come away from this thinking it’s true. You can easily teach sequences with an obviously made-up example, with, say, a story about a dog who walks down the street and finds a bologna sandwich. If young children walk away from that thinking that a dog actually did walk down the street and find a bologna sandwich, it doesn’t really matter. It matters if they walk away thinking that the Christian God created the universe in six days and can’t tell the fucking difference between a fish and a vegetable, that’s a problem. That’s indoctrination.
Previously, the curriculum introduced students to Christianity alongside other major religions, but that unit was cut. Now, they can learn that Mansa Musa took a trip to Mecca without bothering to explain why that location is important or any mention of the Prophet Muhammad. And one of the biggest changes was made in a section teaching 5th graders about Leonardo da Vinci by giving them five paragraphs on the Biblical background of the Last Supper, including passages from the Gospel of Matthew.
The “good” news, if there’s any to be found here, is that “only” a quarter of Texas school districts have signed up for this curriculum. The “very bad” news is that I can guarantee that these lessons are going to end up in other states, particularly those states that have made serious moves to demolish the wall separating Church and State.
Georgia, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Florida, and other “red” states have targeted the education of minors to inject their Christian propaganda. Because as always, every accusation is a confession: they know that actually educating kids in the arts and sciences creates well-rounded adults who reject authoritarian theocracies, and they simply cannot have that.
