Kelly Shackelford’s Free Market Foundation sounds the alarm: Curriculum experts working at the behest of the State Board of Education want to abolish Christmas.

How’s that? Well, maybe not so much abolish it as excise it from print. One proposal for reform of the public schools curriculum says, let’s ask students to “explain the significance of religious holidays such as…” Well, such as Diwali. You’ve heard of it, naturally. Me, too. I looked it up in Wikipedia after failing to unearth a definition in the American Heritage Dictionary. Diwali is “a significant festival in Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism,” celebrating inner light. A five-day festival, Diwali marks such events as the return to Rama to Ayodhya and the killing of Narakasura, an evil demon.

The piddling holiday it would replace in the curriculum, for exploration purposes, is something called Christmas.

Now if you think the elected State Board of Education is going to consent to the study of a Hindu holiday in place of a Christian holiday once famous for its beneficent effects on department store bottom lines –if you think that, you probably expect Kinky Friedman to become our next governor. Won’t happen, and don’t we all know it?

Yet the effrontery of the proposal reminds us of what extraordinary things are afoot in the 21st century. Such as attempts to displace once-common understandings and allegiances with new, sometimes literally foreign ones that, to some, seem more open-minded, more inclusive, less guilt-inducing.

We wouldn’t want innocent children supposing the state of Texas puts any pedagogical value on Christmas, would we? Let’s go for Diwali, huh? In a few years, your average middle schooler will know how to spell it. On from there!

Malcolm Muggeridge writes somewhere about the spectacle of “a ruling class on the run” – shorn of former certitudes, yet unsure what to believe now; afraid of castigation for holding to the unfashionable. In the cultural vacuum such a class creates comes the curriculum consultants, the trendy clerics (the Fr. Kev Kevins of Walker Percy’s fiction) the self-deputized champions of supposedly trodden-upon constituencies.

I’ve lately myself written a book on Category 2 – the priests and ministers of the Gospel who can’t quickly enough tell us how quickly we need to get rid of dross like virgin births, divine creators, and, especially, moral teachings that restrict personal choice. Choice in anything, almost. Maybe not in voting Republican. But choice, yes, that’s the big deal.

(In Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity, I use my, and my family’s, Episcopal Church as lens for inspecting and deploring liberal Christianity’s chameleon ways, its preference for “justice” and “inclusion” as topics of concern much, much larger than Sin and Redemption. But enough self-promotion for now.)

The idea of promoting cultural change via curriculum reform — so that it gets paid for as well as adopted in behalf of the taxpayer – is one disturbing idea. We all pretty much, though not to the degree that was true half a century ago, put our children in public schools, where no one can tell what intellectual fashion will be in vogue next year. That’s one thing that gives the present curriculum-design hearings such pertinence. It seems on other fronts – besides the question of what he holidays we hold up for inspection – that the board will be immersed, fully clothed, in disputes over the religious intent of the founding fathers and the moral bona fides of particular subjects and figures (e.g., slavery, Cesar Chavez, and John Wayne).

The SBOE being a pretty good board, for all the hisses it provokes from Texas liberals, the basic curriculum likely won’t suffer grave damage: no red-suited Ramas sliding down the chimney and so on. The textbooks from which young Texans learn during the next decade will bear some relationship, possibly a conspicuous one, to textbooks that have steadily presented over many decades the heritage of the American people.

But, oh, why do we have to worry and fret all the time over what’s going to happen with or texts, etc.?

Three reasons:

1) The disintegration of our old cultural consensus. Was the Alamo a good thing or not? We used not even to think about it. Of course it was a good thing. Now one goes into fingernail-biting mode over what Hispanic Texans will say and think if the traditional interpretation gets pushed too hard. Maybe some words about land-grabbing interlopers from Tennessee? Hmmm…

2) The intellectual establishment has bought more substantially than has any other quarter of society into the myth of our American guilt for this, that, and the other.

3) The public schools are our schools, taxpayer-funded, taxpayer-patronized. They have to get it right, or else. Or else, what? They slump more deeply than ever into mediocrity and irrelevance; their abandonment by the smart and motivated in favor of private schools and, yes, of home schools, taught by old-fashioned parents who actually think Truth might be Truth instead of cultural embarrassment.

Good luck to the state board, is all that any of us can say.

Comments (0)

Comment	smaller | bigger
Name
Write the displayed characters
Subscribe via email (Registered users only) I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.
	Add Comment