Conservative history
Reading about "conservative" efforts to change history textbooks, one is reminded of many good quotes. George Orwell, once a hero of conservatives, said, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who
controls the present controls the past." Napoleon: "What is history but a fable agreed upon?" Or, more alarmingly, Hitler, who in one of his many formulations on the topic, said, "Give me the youth…let me control the textbooks, and I will
control the state." On the other hand, I remember high school, and, although I loved history, my mind was consistently on only one thing, and the only historical reasoning involved was "today's miniskirt is even better than yesterday's!" A good and timeless quote, too.
The move in Texas, one of the largest buyers of textbooks and in theory influential nationally, is less about history than propaganda. Thus we get the failure of Jamestown as "socialism" long before such a political-economic formulation existed. As Dick Armey would have it, starvation in the colony was because of those hippy-dippy libs, rather than a variety of complex factors, including that the English noblemen in the party (the class equivalent to what Armey represents today) didn't want to work to grow food, thinking it beneath them. Similarly, Jefferson is to be erased because he advocated separation between church and state (as did virtually all the founders) — a messy inconvenience for those advocating theocracy. We know who they are. We know the power they lust after. This is one more path to it.
My bigger worry is summed up in the fuller quote from Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring." We don't really teach history in most of our schools and haven't for decades, it being subsumed in "social studies," and now sidelined by teaching-to-the-test and indoctrinating young people to be good worker bees. This latter is alarmingly true even at universities, where students are funneled into business schools and vocational training, not the "universal education" including the humanities. And such necessary study for a self-governing society is virtually non-existent at the for-profit "universities" once called business colleges.
12