No enlightenment in Texas.

• Author: Hightower, Jim
• Position: Vox Populist - Social studies instruction in Texas

In the good-and-good-for-you department, food scientists are now touting the health benefits of enjoying a handful of nuts every day.

I, for one, am glad, because I love nuts--pecans, hazelnuts, pistachios, almonds, you-name-em. But my favorite nuts, by far, are the homegrown natives that have taken root in one particularly fertile area of my state: the Texas Board of Education. You just can't get any nuttier than this bunch!

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This board, little known even to us Texans, has lately risen to national notoriety, making our state's educational system a punch line for comedians everywhere. That's because a handful of ultra-rightwing nutcases have taken over this elected overseer of Texas educational policy, and they're hell-bent on supplanting classroom education with their own brand of ideological indoctrination.

Their way of achieving this political goal is to rewrite the state standards that textbook publishers must follow to get the lucrative contracts for providing teaching materials for every student in the state, from first grade through high school. Their latest exercise in ideological correctness comes at the expense of the social studies curriculum. They've gone through guidelines for history, government, economics, and sociology textbooks, purging references that offend their doctrinaire sensibilities and substituting their own nutty biases and ignorance.

How nutty?

Take Thomas Jefferson. They did! They literally did take Jefferson off a list of revolutionary political thinkers from the Enlightenment period, replacing him with a favorite of Christian fundamentalists, John Calvin. Thus, the prime author of our Declaration of Independence-poof--disappeared! Jefferson's unpardonable transgression? He coined the phrase "separation between church and state."

Any concepts that might spur progressive thoughts in young minds were also expunged.

"Justice," for example, was stripped from a list of virtues meant to teach grade-schoolers the characteristics of good citizenship. So, too, "responsibility for the common good." And they insisted that...