“Texas Con­ser­v­a­tives Win Cur­ricu­lum Change” by James McKin­ley, Jr.; The New York Times; 3/12/2010.

Com­ment: Because of its size, Texas wields a dis­pro­por­tion­ately large influ­ence over school cur­ric­ula. The Texas Board of Education’s deci­sion to delete text­book ref­er­ences to Thomas Jef­fer­son in favor of men­tion of Thomas Aquinas and Jean Calvin will affect far more than the unfor­tu­nate pupils of  “Baja Oklahoma!”

After three days of tur­bu­lent meet­ings, the Texas Board of Edu­ca­tion on Fri­day approved a social stud­ies cur­ricu­lum that will put a con­ser­v­a­tive stamp on his­tory and eco­nom­ics text­books, stress­ing the supe­ri­or­ity of Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism, ques­tion­ing the Found­ing Fathers’ com­mit­ment to a purely sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment and pre­sent­ing Repub­li­can polit­i­cal philoso­phies in a more pos­i­tive light. The vote was 10 to 5 along party lines, with all the Repub­li­cans on the board vot­ing for it.

The board, whose mem­bers are elected, has influ­ence beyond Texas because the state is one of the largest buy­ers of textbooks. . . .

Even the course on world his­tory did not escape the board’s scalpel.

Cyn­thia Dun­bar, a lawyer from Rich­mond who is a strict con­sti­tu­tion­al­ist and thinks the nation was founded on Chris­t­ian beliefs, man­aged to cut Thomas Jef­fer­son from a list of fig­ures whose writ­ings inspired rev­o­lu­tions in the late 18th cen­tury and 19th cen­tury, replac­ing him with St. Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and William Black­stone. (Jef­fer­son is not well liked among con­ser­v­a­tives on the board because he coined the term “sep­a­ra­tion between church and state.”)

“The Enlight­en­ment was not the only phi­los­o­phy on which these rev­o­lu­tions were based,” Ms. Dun­bar said.