Abstract
If Barbara Cargill has her way creationism and intelligent design will soon be taught in Texan public schools. Cargill, the chairman of the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE), has called for the repeal of a law that bars the board from reviewing the content of textbooks.
The board currently only has the power to ensure textbooks meet the curriculum, but Cargill is keen for the board to have the powers to review content, and that would mean the board could make changes based on a personal or ideological bias.
Cargill has been labelled “a stealth creationist” by the Texas Freedom Network, an activist group that “advances a mainstream agenda of religious freedom and individual liberties to counter the religious right”.
A Republican, Cargill, is also a former biology teacher, from The Woodlands, a community about 30 miles north of Houston. She was elected to the SBOE in 2004, appointed chair of the board by Governor Rick Perry in 2011, and reappointed in 2013.
The law she wants to overturn is Senate Bill 1 passed by the 74th Texas legislature in 1995. The bill was intended to put to rest the culture wars that still erupt on a near annual basis at the SBOE, which oversees curriculum and teaching materials for the second largest education system in the United States. It also updates subject-based standards.
Cargill wants the board to hark back to the days before restrictions on its powers were imposed, a time when the Mel and Norma Gabler, a husband and wife team, began reviewing textbooks from a conservative Christian viewpoint. The organisation the Gablers founded, Educational Research Analysts, based in Longview in east Texas, was the forerunner of other pressure groups who lobby in this area. What these groups have in common is a distrust of anything that smacks of a liberal agenda that might upset their religious beliefs.
Still active today, Educational Research Analysts publishes guidelines advising that health books that make references to “married couples” or “married people” are unambiguous attempts to promote homosexuality. History textbooks, the group maintains, should promote the role of religion in the development of the United States and point out that the Supreme Court gained more power through the “neglect of the original intent of the constitution”.
While the Gablers have gone to meet their maker, the tactics they employed have been picked up by the likes of the Texans for Better Science Education and the Discovery Institute, and other conservative groups that promote the theory of intelligent design.
While currently barred from revising textbooks unless they are factually incorrect, the members of the SBOE still do have enormous power to steer the creation of those texts by setting the standards they must aspire to.
Above: Demonstrators show their support for science education outside the State Board of Education, September 2013, Austin, Texas
Credit: Eric Gay/PA/AP
In 2010, the SBOE instituted social studies standards that downplayed slavery’s role in the Civil War; implied that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist hunts in the 1950s were justified, and removed the concept of “responsibility for the common good”, which, according to the Texas Freedom Network, one board member found too communistic. This year’s attempt to undermine the presentation of evolution in biology textbooks looks likely to fail because publishers balked at some of the revisions which they considered ideological rather than factual.
History textbooks, the group maintains, should promote the role of religion in the development of the United States
Cargill is not the only conservative Christian on the board. The organisation, which is selected in off-year election cycles in a state not known for its voter turnout, attracts large amounts of funding from conservative groups. One former chairman, Don McElroy, an avowed creationist who believes that man and dinosaurs coexisted, told the Washington Times that evolution was “hooey”. Cargill herself has lamented that there are only “six true conservative Christians on the board.”
Texan and American children need to be able to explore the broadest possible education, free from superstition and based in fact
But the ideological tug of war obscures the real issue with the Texas SBOE – the tyranny of the small. Of the 10 Republicans on the board, only three live in cities that have populations over 500,000. The rest live in towns that range from 16,000 to 200,000 inhabitants. On the Democratic side, only one board member lives in an area with fewer than half a million people.
In general, Texas’ small towns are overwhelming white, conservative redoubts, afraid of the larger changes in America’s culture. While small town residents are likely to be just as intelligent as city dwellers, they are not exposed to the sheer variety of viewpoints offered by living in a large urban centre.
Texan and American children need to be able to explore the broadest possible education, free from superstition and based in fact, even theoretical fact. They need an education that ensures that the country can compete on a global scale.
Cargill may not get her wish to strike the law that inadequately restrains the SBOE, but the damage her presence on board continues and her conservative, Christian viewpoint which she inflicts on Texan education system will be felt for decades to come. Textbook publishers are still handcuffed by the standards the State Board of Education continues to enact. All this matters because Texas’ textbook market is the second largest in the United States and the print run of a Texas edition goes further than the state borders.