Can you imagine a modern U.S. childhood education without a recitation of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech? Arguably one of the greatest speeches of all time? How about an education on this history of the United States without a lesson on the Emancipation Proclamation? Hard to imagine, right? Yet, a recent bill in Texas bill aims to ban teaching of critical race theory, placing educators on front lines of culture war over how history is taught.
We can't change America's literal history in order to assuage what some are taking as a personal attack. In his petition to his state representatives, Siddhanth Pachipala summarized the future of Texas education best: "what would remain would be a condensed, whitened version of the history of Texas and the United States that ignores BIPOC struggles and triumphs. How can students be equipped to reckon with the racial realities of today without knowledge of our racist past?"
On July 9th, Bryan Hughes, a Republican member of the Texas State Senate, introduced bill 87(1) SB 3 for committee consideration in the state legislature. The bill effectively seeks to erase marginalized histories from "the social studies curriculum for each grade level from kindergarten through grade 12." On July 16, the bill was passed in the Senate.
You can read the full text of the bill: https://capitol.texas.gov/Search/DocViewer.aspx?ID=871SB000031B&QueryText=%22social+studies%22&DocType=B
You can join Pachipala's effort and sign his petition to prohibit Texas representatives from removing minority history from the K-12 curriculum at: http://chng.it/GM7C9RxhMf
Think this is a new tactic? Oh boy, how it's not. I highly recommend Anthony Conwright's essay in his recent feature "Today It’s Critical Race Theory. 200 Years Ago It Was Abolitionist Literature." He argues the common factor is the continued fear of Black liberation. Read this hauntingly piece full of echos of the past at: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/critical-race-theory-slave-abolition-school-literature/
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