Science and Social Studies Are Not About Feelings
Extremists on the Texas State Board of Education are apparently very sensitive, and they want to engineer the curriculum so that none of it hurts their feelings.
They want to eliminate evolutionary theory from the science curriculum because it makes them unhappy to consider that primates (what we humans are) have a common ancestry with other primates that aren’t as pretty as we are.
Now it seems that they’re just as sensitive about social studies. Historical figures like Cesar Chavez, Thurgood Marshall, and Barbara Jordan make them unhappy, so they want to eliminate them from the history books especially designed for Texas youth by a handful of SBOE members. They would like instead to feature such entertainers as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh as important historical figures, because these professional cheerleaders make them feel good about our national identity. The state school board extremists also want to eliminate discussion of any events that make the United States or the free enterprise system look bad in any way whatsoever. Most importantly, they don’t see any reason to include information about any of those other strange countries they’ve heard might exist out there in the world.
I imagine some people had the same kind of hurt feelings when Galileo tried to convince them that the earth rotated around the sun, a theory based on painstaking scientific measurements. They hated the idea that we might not be living at the center of the universe, and they felt that it was an insult to humanity to be described as existing on some round ball chained to the sun.
We’ve come a long way since those dark times. Most people accept that the earth is round and that it rotates around the sun, but we still have a few holdouts that want education to make them feel good about themselves. So here we are, centuries later in Texas trying to rewrite the definition of science and social studies, all because seven extremists on the State Board of Education have hurt feelings.
