A perverse alignment of state politics and capitalism gives the Texas schoolbook authorities great power over education, nationally. Texas law uniquely creates partisan political control over the curriculum, and thus the purchase of textbooks, in Texas. Texas, being very populous, is a market that textlbook publishers cannot afford to ignore. Since no other very populous state has such uniquely partisan political control over these things, and thus none have a mechanism to refuse books made to order for Texas's "unique" brand of conservativism, the publishers have no motivation to offer anything else. All of our kids get what the Texas schoolbook authorities select. This has been going on for many decades, and the cummulative result is that kids nationwide learn a simply delusional history of our country. I rarely meet history professors, even conservative ones, who don't complain that what our kids learn in K-12 about history is worse than nothing.

Lots of people now recognize that the Jack Webb ideal of "Just the facts, Ma'am," is unobtainable. We know that we interpret, and thus spin, the facts as we commit them to memory, and we further color them, according to our theories, as we reinterpret and describe them to other people. This works like Murphy's so-called "laws". Take, for instance: "the toast always lands butter-side down." It's not true, but we notice and remember disasters better than we remember avoided disasters, and the toast landing butter-side down is a (small) kind of disaster. Similarly, we notice disasters that our political theories, right or left, seem to have predicted, better than we remember cases when our political theories predicted disasters that didn't happen.

Once we learn this, as most people now do, there are two main paths that we can take. First, we can give up on making progress in honest debate and decide that there is no truth, only spin. If we go this jaded, neo-conservative way, then we see the world as a fact-less contest between rival spins. Forget facts, the point of life is to win the contest of spin! Second, and more reasonably, we can redouble our effort to find and be fair to facts. If we go this second way, we keep the Jack Webb ideal but realize that it we will not always achieve the ideal. We can do a better or worse job at being loyal to the facts, but we cannot always do a perfect job. Still, it is much better to be trying for the facts than to be trying simply to win battles of pure spin. Few of us really doubt that there are facts and that we know some of them. For instance, most of us know what we had for supper last night, what kind of car we drive, where we live, and so on. The trick is to carry the straight-headedness we use in those cases into more contentious ones, like political and religious debates.

The Texas schoolbook authorities have changed American education for the worse, not for the first time: their new victories put incredible spin ahead of what may plausibly be the facts. For instance, they managed to throw out the relatively accurate term, "capitalism", and replace it with the too vague to mean anything, but more positive, phrase, "free enterprise". They managed to get rid of any mention of the hundreds of times that the U.S. government crushed labor with financial and military force, on behalf of capitalists -- excuse me, "free enterprise-ists" -- but they got in mention of the very few times, out of hundreds, that Joe McCarthy was maybe correct in accusing people of being communists. They got in many other changes of this sort -- too many to mention, but most just as silly.

They think, no doubt, that these changes will win future generations to conservative causes. But they are wrong. Such changes will never make it into institutions that value critical thinking, like accredited colleges. They can try to combat this by condemning college as liberal, as they have done for years. Indeed, in defense of their recent actions, several of them admitted that they are at war with "experts", which is to say, the kind of people who teach in colleges. The majority of these Texas authories are without relevant expertise or credentials, themselves. What they want us to believe is that they are better qualified than college professors precisely because they are without relevant expertise or credentials. Their ignorance is something they admit and wear like a badge of honor, claiming that it makes their judgment purer and better than the judgment of the learned, of college professors who have peer-recognized ability in their fields and who have dedicated their lives to the tough world of peer-reviewed study in those fields, with very little compensation.

What they might succeed in doing, God forbid!, is convincing more young people to avoid serious college study, by giving them the excuse that there are no facts, only spin. But if they succeed in doing that, they will hardly have convinced these young people to go for knee-jerk, anti-intellectual conservatism. For if they convince young people to give up on learning, expertise, facts, etc., there is no reason why those young people will then flock to boring old conservative spin. Instead, in that case young people will spin things in a way that they think cooler, and the result will likely horrify these strangely powerful old Texas wingnuts beyond anything they now imagine.

Convince white kids in Texas that there are no facts, only spin, and maybe most of them will jump on that excuse to hate health care reform and love guns and Southern Baptist religion. But the effects will be far different in California, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Florida, and Virginia. I suspect that the Texas schoolbook authorities' current attempt to make our young people more conservative will prove to be as flawed as their grasp of history.

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