The state wants to force schools to teach six years of Texas History. Guess what they're getting rid of to make room.

If you're going to require six years of state history, something is gonna have to go.

Welcome to The Experiment, where we were all set to write about how a transformation of media technology in the ‘90s weaponized sexism as entertainment. But on Friday some news got dumped, and barely anyone noticed, so we’re going to talk about it.

On April 8, the Texas State Board of Education (think the school board for all of Texas) voted to “significantly increase” how often state history is taught in Texas public schools. And by “significantly increase,” they mean “please find your seats and make sure your seat belts are securely tightened because everything’s about to get weird.”

Like me, you might have gone to public school in a state that did not let Walt Disney write the social studies standards and taken a mere semester of state history. I took Washington state history in high school where we learned not much of anything because 1) Washington state is not even the most important place named Washington in the country, and 2) this was before Twilight, when Washington state officially became interesting. Besides, the class was a history requirement and not a fetish as it is here in Texas.

Right now, Texas requires two years of state history instruction, in the 4th and 7th grades. I’ll leave it to you to speculate why it’s important to teach children and not high schoolers the history of a state that twice seceded to preserve slavery (once from Mexico and once from the United States), but that’s not important now. What’s important is that in Texas, kids are getting a lot of state history already.

And now this: The state board told its experts to start writing Texas history curriculum standards for Kindergarten through grade 2 and then in the entirety of middle school, grades 6-8. This means that “students will study Texas and the people and events that define it in most grade levels prior to high school,” according to a press release.

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“Students will study Texas and the people and events that define it in most grade levels prior to high school.”

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I’ve been let into a private Texas history teachers Facebook group where teachers took a dim view of the changes that would fundamentally change the experience of going to school in Texas. Elsewhere, crickets. If you can find a news outlet that covered this, please reply with a link, but I couldn’t find a single story.

So let’s talk about it.

We don’t know exactly what they would teach in the expanded Texas History, only that the standards now stop at reconstruction and would now continue to the present. This is good, because it would include important events in Texas history in the 20th century, such as the births of Ann Richards, Molly Ivins, and Beyonce. What we don’t know is what teachers would be required to teach because the state board’s experts only now got their marching orders.

In reality, however, we know exactly what will be required. In researching chapter 21 of Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, I learned how this works. The state board gives their working groups instructions. Then the working groups, which are made up of proper experts such as history teachers, try to write up what are called “standards,” which is basically a paragraph summary of what the curriculum for a particular class should or must include. And then the state board, which is made up of unpaid elected officials you never heard of before, votes on it, which is usually where the cheese falls completely off the cracker.

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Then the state board votes on it, which is where the cheese falls off the cracker.

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In Forget the Alamo, we showed how the conflict between multiculturalism and traditionalism resulted in cramming too many names and facts into the standards in 2010. When the social studies standards came up for renewal several years later, the state board told its working groups to streamline the standards. In good faith, those experts jettisoned requirements until the history standards contained only what was necessary for the children and not what make the adult politicians happy.

In particular, they dropped the word “heroic” when referring the people who died defending the Alamo. They did this not because they didn’t think they were heroic but because the politicians in 2010 wrote an unteachable standard, namely to teach about every single one of the “heroic” nearly 200 defenders, which, if taken literally, would eat up the entirety of 7th grade Texas History. The issue wasn’t heroism but time. They were told to streamline, so they did.

That’s when Texas Monthly got hold of the recommendations and misinterpreted the excision of that word. “Should Texas Schoolchildren Be Taught That Alamo Defenders Were ‘Heroic’?” blared the headline, and a political dog pile ensued. The Governor started it with “Stop this politically incorrect nonsense,” and it got progressively dumber from there. A few days later, the state board voted to require that kids be taught that everyone who died defending the Alamo from Mexico’s abolitionist army was heroic. Teachers are not required to teach that anyone else was a hero — not even Sam Houston or the astronauts who got to the moon only to place a collect call to Houston.

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My point is that the process of devising what is taught to Texas kids is vulnerable to political pressure, of which there is a lot when it comes to teaching Texas history. First off, these days if you can’t say something nice, you’re fired. In fact, state law says that a “teacher may not be compelled to discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs,” which sounds fine until you understand that they really don’t want people taught that White people did bad things to Black people. Or Brown ones, and women, and don’t forget the Indigenous folks, and the Chinese laborers… Basically, White people are fine, shut up, state law.

That would be bad enough if our Anglo political class weren’t all up in their feelings about The 1619 Project. In Texas, the official response was to pass The 1836 Project, which required that the Governor be advised by a panel of appointed historians in a patriotic version of Texas history. Also, they’d print up pamphlets and — I wish I were making this up — give them out to people getting their driver’s licenses. I never thought my Russian studies degree would come in so handy in understanding the absurd propagandists running Texas.

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I never thought my Russian studies degree would come in so handy in understanding the absurd propagandists running Texas.

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All of this is to say that what is likely to be foisted on Texas educators will probably be infused with a lot of chest-thumpy hoo-hah. To be fair, many Texans don’t need to be told to be patriotic or to try to separate the good guys from the bad guys at the Alamo.

The problem with that is two-fold. First, there is an unmissable yet unmentionable racial angle to the traditional Heroic Anglo Narrative about the Alamo. I have a friend who grew up in San Antonio a million years ago, and he told me that he and his friends used to “play Alamo” after school. The Anglo kids played the Texians, and the Latino kids were the Mexicans, except when they played Alamo, the white kids won.

That brings us to the second problem with a patriotic pedagogy. Teaching the Texas origin story as one of manly strength results in confusion. As I’ve written before here, a huge number of present-day Texans, including a majority of Hispanics, are wrong about who won the Battle of the Alamo. If the White guys were the good and virtuous heroes, weren’t they the winners?

That’s how Texas politicians get themselves into ahistorical blind alleys, such as when Rick Perry recently bragged about his state’s role in America’s energy independence. “We’re the Alamo,” he said. “Texas is the last line of defense.” Ohh, Ricky.

Glenn Hamer @GlennHamer

. @GovernorPerry is on fire @TCCRI Policy Forum. “We’re the Alamo — Texas is the last line of defense.” Former US Energy Sec supports all of the above energy policy. Blasts those declaring war on oil & gas as an attack on TX. Says TX LNG critical for global security & climate.

The likelihood that Texas kids could be on the receiving end of six years of Texas History patriotic re-education is more than an ideological worry. It’s an instructional one as well. If Texas History is netting four additional years, that means kids will be losing four years of other social studies subjects.

What Texas kids could be giving up to learn about Texas history is a basic education in civics. In Kindergarten and 1st grade, they study the “foundation for responsible citizenship in society.”

Students understand that a constitutional republic is a representative form of government whose representatives derive their authority from the consent of the governed, serve for an established tenure, and are sworn to uphold the constitution.

To be fair, it’s possible that this won’t be required knowledge much longer.

In another section of the Kindergarten and Grade 1 social studies standards, students are required to “identify and discuss how the actions of U.S. citizens and the local, state, and federal governments have either met or failed to meet the ideals espoused in the founding documents.” I sit in awe of whoever got this past the state board and into the curriculum standards for 5-year-olds. Kudos.

At best, the state board will figure out how to infuse teaching kids about civics and democracy with lessons and examples from Texas history. At worst, the elected officials governing Texas public schools will dump teaching about democracy in favor of provincial patriotism. I am not filled with confidence. The state board takes this up again in June and should vote on the final changes in November. Between now and then, though, you can reach out to your representative on the Texas State Board of Education and let them know what you think. You know who that is, don’t you? I mean, you’ve read this far, so you obviously care so much about education in Texas that you know who your state board commissioner is, right?

Yeah, I had to look it up, too.

* I have since learned that while everyone expects Texas history to end up as patriotic as I portrayed, the social studies lessons in civics and democracy won’t be completely replaced. Rather, Texas history will be embedded in the regular social studies curriculum. How this works in implementation remains to be seen. If they teach Texas history chronologically, do Kindergarteners have to learn about basic civics alongside Spanish colonialism? Regardless, however, what we’re expecting is some of the social studies curriculum will be muscled aside to make room for Texas history but won’t be replaced wholesale.

Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.

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