Texas Textbook Massacre

This past week’s Socratic circle was quite interesting. Personally, I disagreed with the revision of the traditional history textbook that took place in the state of Texas. I feel that it was way too completely skewed to the right, and did not correctly cover minorities, as a history book should, for this is America after all, the land of the “free”, and if that statement still holds true then it should not matter what religion, race, or gender you are, as long as you impacted history in some way, you should have the right to be included. The state of Texas neglected to see this point, instead hardly mentioning, or even completely replacing significant minority figures.



Now to address the question that often came up in the circle, “How do we not know that our information is not already biased, or false, and is it possible that the knowledge we have is over skewed to the left as it is?” Well it’s true, we were not there, we cannot recall what really took place even a hundred years ago, let alone further back in history. I believe that the best we can do is use the given information we have already. There are probably some falsities, but to fully revise the history textbook based on a bias that does not even comply with the given rights of equality set by the founders of this country, does not seem accurate for such a nation as ours. Now to create a bias free text book seems like an almost impossible feat. Creators can change the information in any way they want, and to simply record “facts” would be difficult, for what is a “fact”? It’s truthful information in one person’s mind and a lie in another’s. Personally I believe we should just keep the textbook system how it is, yes it does seem a tad skewed to the left, but it covers all aspects of history unlike its opposition.


As in comparison to the novel “1984” by George Orwell, the Texas textbook situation draws multiple parallels. I found the Texas government to be quite similar to that of the Party in Oceania. They both took information from the past and changed it to suit their given political views so that their citizens would learn history in a way that fitted their current political stance. I also found it amusing that The Party wiped out the capitalists and made them seem like bad guys, while in the Texas textbook, they also wiped out the idea of capitalism and replaced it with the free enterprise system, suggesting that capitalism never existed, or that it shouldn’t.


Overall, I feel that Texas did a terrible job in their so called revision of the traditional textbook, and that for students in that state to get a well rounded background of historical knowledge before they enter the real world, Texas should give up their textbook massacre and go about this in a more reasonable way, by either adapting the textbook standard used by the rest of the country.