The Texas State Board of Education has approved a required K-12 reading list, the first state to mandate a common core of books for all its 5.5 million schoolchildren statewide. Such selections are usually left to individual teachers, English departments, local school boards, or a mix of all three.
The Republican-controlled education board recently voted 9-5 to incorporate the reading list into the curriculum beginning in 2030. This gives opponents several more years to raise their concerns that have already surfaced. The central objection centers on the inclusion of one book in particular: the Bible. This book is arguably the second-most-banned book in the United States, topped only by Heather Has Two Mommies.
Many of the biblical passages on the list refer to God, Jesus, Satan, and other divine figures. “We have a good, healthy portion of people of other religions or no religion,” said Rebecca Bell-Metereau, a Democrat on the Texas education board and former professor of English at Texas State University. “So there really isn’t, in my view, a good justification for trying to turn our public schools into Sunday schools.”
This is precisely what Texas is not doing. It is not an unconstitutional attempt to infuse the Sunday sermon into the public school arena. Including snippets from the Bible in an overall reading list of almost 200 titles, including George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech to West Point cadets, does not add up to Sunday school.
The excerpts from the Bible begin with “Jonah and the Whale” in the first grade. The kids then get a break from Christian indoctrination, as the progressives would have it, for two years, but God returns with less than vengeance in the fourth grade with “The Necessity of Humility” (Luke 14: 7-11). From then on, students will read an excerpt or story from the Bible every year until graduation in the 12th grade, where, except for the college-bound, the teenagers will blast out of the schoolhouse door overjoyed that they will never have to sit in a classroom again. And they certainly won’t remember that in their senior year, they read “The Definition of Love” in First Corinthians.
It is the case that some books on the list are almost as “deeply problematic” as the Bible for the enlightened elite: progressives, Marxists, mainstream Democrats, so-called “democratic socialists,” atheists, secularists, feminists, and non-binary sexualists. Writings reeking of conservative values include A Book of Americans by Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet, the Eulogy for President Reagan by Margaret Thatcher, excerpts from The Children’s Book of Virtue by William Bennett, and Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand. Along with the fountainhead of the free market, the Texas list does what liberals always claim they want, but not really: A wide range of political, social, and economic points of view.
In this marketplace of ideas, there is some good news for the Left with appearances by Pocahontas (Grade 1), Frederick Douglass (Grade 1), Susan B. Anthony (Grade 2), Anne Frank (Grade 7), and Martin Luther King (Grade 10). The black poet, Langston Hughes, makes the list three times (K, 4, and 7).
The list also includes many classics high school students have either endured or enjoyed since the beginning of the 20th century, first among them Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (Grade 11). In the New York Times, Sarah Mervosh notes the list was “highly contested” in part because of the “focus on classic texts, often written by white and male authors, stirring debate about what qualifies as essential literature in a highly diverse state.”
Putting aside the staleness and lameness of this old argument, even for most on the Left, one dead white male author towers above all. Very few want to cancel the Bard. The Texas list doubles down on Shakespeare with Hamlet (Grade 12) and The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (Grade 10). Romeo and Juliet did not make the cut in Texas. Nonetheless, the feud between the Capulet and Montague families, culminating in Juliet gloriously stabbing herself to death with Romeo’s dagger, remains a central part of the high school curriculum throughout the other 49 states. It is the most frequently assigned reading in public and private high schools, according to the National Council of Teachers of English.
Given that the public school system has been in a long decline over the past few decades, maybe a strong blend of moral classics along with the theme of national pride, plus a sprinkling of Christian messages, isn’t a bad idea. In the two areas frequently measured by educational research organizations — math and reading — middle school and high school students perform about four grades below the grade they are in. This shows up vividly after high school graduation. Some of the biggest course enrollments at four-year universities — and even more so at community colleges — are remedial math and English classes taken in the freshman year.
In other words, high-school-level classes taught in college.
Data compiled by the National Center for Educational Statistics found that about 40% of community college students and 15% to 30% of students at four-year colleges and universities have taken at least one remedial course. (Full disclosure: For many years, I had a job as a college textbook salesman for a large publishing company. The book that brought in a nice commission for me due to staggering sales was titled Pre-Algebra — that is, seventh- and eighth-grade arithmetic. An honest title such as Middle School Arithmetic would not look good sitting on a table in the college cafeteria next to another student’s book, Calculus One.)
The result of this effort to get students prepared for college-level work is striking. Fewer than half of students who start college taking remedial courses complete a college degree within six years, according to the U.S. Education Department. The Texas book list can’t stop this monstrous college drop-out rate, but a rigorous curriculum, such as the Lone Star state has proposed, could jack up high school graduation standards and readiness to take on college coursework without remedial classes.
IN WAR ON BIBLE, PASTOR CONVICTED FOR PREACHING GOSPEL
Many teachers don’t buy in. “The lists will eat up weeks of valuable instruction time,” Diane Miller, a member of the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts, told the Houston Chronicle. “It’s a bridge too far to cross.”
No. That bridge should topple into the Rio Grande with a few well-placed sticks of dynamite. Yes. The list will eat up weeks of valuable instructional time. One certainly hopes so. That is what it is intended to do.
Bob Armstrong is a contributing writer to the online magazine Thursday Review and the author of a just-published memoir, No Exit from Vietnam (Pen & Sword Books).