the tx reactionary curriculum controversy will seem less dire if you ditch the basic delusions that: children are perfectly plastic and curricula make them what they are; that history at any level consists of a reciting of uncontroversial facts; that people remember what they learn in school; that history textbooks hold anyone's attention; that children agree with whatever they're told. such things are the nightmarish platitudes of those - starting with plato - who hold that we can transform the word by re-engineering a generation. the efficacy, and even the possibility, of education strike me as profoundly questionable. so i'm chill!

you also might think about this as the opposite number of a thousand pc interventions: the kind that got george washington carver or somebody's wifey their own shaded box. now, if you think that it's legit for leftists to re-write history books to reflect their contemporary ideas about social justice, you need to expect a backlash and also that everyone will play the same game. i think a lot of people would view a fundamental purpose of education as mobilizing the coming generation against global warming. you can call that science if you like, but it's also activism of the kind that's everywhere in school textbooks. i don't know: teach whatever the hell you like.

i wouldn't mind my kids getting taught by a creationist or a global-warming denialist or a mccarthyite. i better not mind, since really they're already getting indoctrinated - insofar as such a thing is possible - with a million things i disagree with. they are taught under the universal presumption, for example, that government has legitimacy and is based on some sort of social contract etc. not only are these views with which i disagree, they are views which i have literally demonstrated to be false, and which, to boot, reflect a groveling capitulation, a global failure of personality. even children have to think. now teaching them to think is just more of the same: teaching them to agree. so i say: tell old pharoah, let my babies go.